Why Abstract Art is Art

Franz Klein Mahoning 1956
Oil on canvas, 203.2 x 254 cm

Convincing people that full abstraction is reasonable art can be a difficult challenge, even though we are coming up on a full century in which abstraction has been a major component of painting. A while back, I set myself a challenge to write an essay for Zen Throw Down that might persuade 'non-believers' to consider abstract painting as art rather than automatically rejecting it. I've been letting the subject marinate in my had for some time, and I think I have something that's reached a form in which it can be shared.

In my experience, the main obstacle in persuading someone to accept an abstract painting like Franz Klein's Mahoning as art is the knee-jerk reaction to say it is "meaningless" or (even more often) that it is "something anyone could do".  So perhaps this is a good place to start. If we can get a person past this initial, visceral "aw, heeeeell no!" reaction, then there is a better chance to convince them to consider each painting individually and give it a chance, rather than simply writing off dozens of great artists and thousands of paintings for no reason except that they are abstract. To attempt more than this is probably not realistic since, as with any art movement, abstract art has its share of crap to dig through in order to find to the good stuff. So I'm not trying to convince anyone that all abstract painting is art, only that it can be art.

So let's start with the "anyone can do it" objection. To deal with it, we need to understand its subtext. When someone raises this objection, what I think they are saying is that they - and all of us in general should - expect an 'artist' to exhibit a technical ability or talent in portraying physical objects or people that sets their work above that of a non-artist. In short, they need to see evidence of talent. This is totally reasonable. To think otherwise would be to believe that masterpieces are no better than random bird droppings on a sidewalk. [As an aside, there are people in the art world who would say this is in fact true. However, such a position is not tenable since it would be foolish to create or buy art while claiming it doesn't exist.]

Despite it being reasonable on the surface, the problem with the "anyone can do it" position is that technical ability (of any kind) is not the most important thing in determining how good a painting is. In fact, it's not the most important factor for determining quality in any branch of the arts. While technical ability is certainly one avenue to judge the quality of a painting or an artist, there are plenty of technically proficient artists out there whose paintings are dull and uninteresting. Similarly, just because someone can write grammatically perfect sentences does not mean that we automatically assume they are capable of writing a novel anyone would want to read.

To illustrate this point more deeply, let's draw an extended analogy in music. A person can be taught to read music, play scales, and understand tempo. However, such technical ability does not bring emotion, relevance, meaning, or individual flair to anything that person might compose or perform. It doesn't make you a good musician. For example, there is nothing technically complex about early Elvis Presley music, the opening bars of "Stairway to Heaven" are fairly easy to play, and Ice Cube's gangsta rap doesn't require the ability to read music. Technical proficiency isn't what sent Elvis Presley into the stratosphere. Technical proficiency isn't the main reason "Stairway to Heaven" remains one of the great rock songs of all time. Technical proficiency isn't the reason rap music captured the imagination of a generation. What Presley, Zeppelin, Ice Cube and other great performers brought to their performances - their personal vision - is a critical part of what sets their work (and them) apart. Many people would argue it's the most important ingredient. In other words, 'you ain't got a thing, if you ain't got that zing.' For a true artist, whatever technical ability they possess supports their artistic vision, not the other way around.

Joan Mitchell Beauvais 1986
oil on canvas diptych, 110 x 157.5"

The same is true in modern art. It is wrong to dismiss abstract art as "something anyone could do" because - as in the music examples above - the best measure of a painting is not its technical execution. [As an aside, it must be pointed out that abstract paintings are - even from a technical angle - not "something anyone could do". Works such as Beauvais by Joan Mitchell require technical abilities related to working with oil, applying paint, and an understanding of color that not any random person picking up a brush possesses.]

So artists can display technical ability whether they are painting a landscape, a portrait, or something abstract. However, it is ultimately the quality of the artistic vision that an artist brings to the painting that distinguishes real art (abstract or representational) from trash.

Artists recognized this distinction centuries ago, and they acted on it long before the radical painters of the 20th Century assertively abandoned representational art. Pinpointing precisely when this realization became an active practice is not easy, but the earliest 'earthquake' likely occurred in France during the late 1800's. Examples include Cezanne, who abandoned a strictly realistic depiction of people and objects. There are also the imaginative compositions of Van Gogh, Gaughin, and others (lumped into the catch-all category of Expressionism). Many of these paintings are not especially realistic in what they portray or how they are painted. Instead, color and form primarily serve the artist's personal vision, not the goal of depicting anything in a technically 'correct' manner.

The most widely known example is the Impressionist movement. These painters intentionally blurred colors and dissolved shapes despite this being a less technically correct means of painting. For the Impressionists, depicting how light impacts the appearance of objects was far more important than a clinical reproduction of a scene from reality. Notably, late paintings by Claude Monet (such as The Water-Lily Pond) are very close to the abstraction many people deride in 20th Century artists. To go further, it's easy to see similarities between The Water-Lily Pond and Mitchell's Beauvais. While Monet's lily pond paintings all have a well-known subject, the fact is there's only the most tenuous attempt at representation in some of these works. They are just a hair's breadth away from Mitchell's abstraction.

Claude Monet The Water-Lily Pond 1917/1920
oil on canvas, 301 x 200.5 cm

While these are the most easily recognized examples, such deviations from reality in favor of artistic vision actually extend much farther back. In many classic works of art - even something as sacrosanct as Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel - we routinely ignore that they are laid out to eschew the normal laws of physics. Some famous Sistine Chapel images are not realistic. For example, Michelangelo depicts God carried by tiny children floating in the air to touch Adam's finger. From the same period, any number of Madonna and Child paintings present the baby Jesus with an adult posture and expression. None of this is realistic; it represents a choice by the artist to deviate from reality in order to more accurately communicate or portray the desired theme or meaning. In all these cases, the deviation is acceptable to us because most of us would agree that what the artist wishes to express is more important than simply creating a slavish reproduction of an object, landscape, or person.

The reason the experiments of the Impressionists and Expressionists were so revolutionary was that they codified the deviations. Theirs was a systematic and actively pursued assertion of the artist's vision trumping displays of reality. As such, artists like Monet, Van Gogh, and Cezanne set the stage for 20th Century artists to go even further. 20th Century artists regularly wrote manifestos explaining and/or justifying the intent of their new visions for art. With such determined activity, new movements (with principle artists) sprung up all over Europe. Fauvism (Matisse), Cubism (Picasso), Surrealism (Dali), and many more openly placed artistic vision in the ascendant. Personal style trumped technique, realism was passe, and subject matter was only a means to an end.

The revolution continued (and perhaps culminated) with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950's, which included artists such as Pollock, Rothko, Mitchell, and many, many more. A famous example of this movement is Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles. Again, as you look at this painting, think about the ways it is similar to Monet's The Water-Lily Pond. In part, Pollock is standing on Monet's (and others') shoulders and simply moving further in the same direction. The same is true for the whole abstract art movement compared to prior movements.

Jackson Pollock Blue Poles 1952
oil on canvas, 6' 11" x 15' 11"

Despite this fact, while Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh are deified by most people, the Abstract Expressionists and other later movements (e.g., Minimalism) are flatly rejected. Most often this rejection occurs because the works are not a painting of anything, which is ultimately the "anyone can do it" objection. The reason art geeks tend to look askance at this objection is that many people who use it to reject Abstract Expressionism accept all the experiments of all the Monets, Picassos, and Van Goghs that led up to abstraction. If you think about it, that is somewhat akin to loving the movie Star Wars but, when the Death Star is destroyed, claiming the movie has jumped the shark. How can you like all the stuff that led up to this logical conclusion and then reject the logical conclusion?

The other objection to abstract paintings like Blue Poles and Beauvais is that they are "meaningless". But this objection doesn't really hold water either. And for the same reason: lack of consistency. After all, what is the meaning of The Water-Lily Pond? What is the meaning of a Van Gogh sunflower still life? We accept many works of art as masterpieces knowing full well they have no intrinsic prosaic "meaning". We love them because they represent the artist's unique vision/style and/or because they speak to us on some level. The thing is that accepting a painting as art for this reason is ultimately the point of Abstract Expressionism. If prior artists could express themselves when ditching form (Monet), single perspective (Picasso), realistic use of color (Matisse), or even reality itself (Dali), then why can't a Pollock, Mitchell, or Rothko express themselves without the use of subject matter? In a very real sense, the move to full abstraction is the Death Star blowing up at the end of a Star Wars movie that began with Cezanne, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists.

Mark Rothko No. 14 1960
oil on canvas, 291 x 268 cm

The other, and far more damning, problem with the "meaningless"argument is that it assumes the only possible meaning a painting can have is one the artist intends or portrays through the objects he paints. This doesn't make any sense. What is often the case - in poetry, music, literature, and painting - is that the meaning of a piece is something of our own. something we bring to the painting/song/poem. It's our interpretation that gives the work meaning.

For example, for me, the meaning of Rothko paintings (such as No. 14) is that they visually represent the correct mind state achieved in Zen Buddhism. The simple composition of No. 14 suggests to me a Zen altar; the colors bring to mind the experience I have have during zazen. The colors and shapes in his paintings vary and, with each variation, they suggest a different kind of meditative state to me: euphoria, early morning quiet, even a seasonality at times. So, for me, there is a Zen Buddhist spirituality in Rothko's paintings. This makes these painting deeply meaningful to me.

I have no idea if my interpretation matches Rothko's intended meaning (or if Rothko had an intended meaning). I have not read much about Rothko as a man. But it really doesn't matter. Whether Rothko intended this meaning or not, this is what his paintings mean to me, and they have this meaning despite the fact that they are not paintings of anything. Abstract art can have profound meaning, especially when we bring something to the table.

Now I don't mean to suggest that we can never say something produced by an artist is meaningless without being accused of not bringing anything to the table. That would be giving a blank check to every hack painter on the face of the Earth. However, I will say that dismissing an entire movement of art and decades of output based on a knee-jerk response/dislike of abstraction is narrow-minded and lazy.

So with the "anyone can do it" argument  and the "meaningless" argument demolished, there really isn't a logical reason to dismiss abstract art as a whole. Of course, this doesn't diminish any ones right to their subjective taste. People have the right to dislike any painting or painter. Sometimes we just don't like something. Period. That's a legitimate reaction to any piece of artistic output. My purpose in this essay is to attempt a persuasive argument against using the knee-jerk anti-abstraction response as a legitimate assessment of a movement. To say that we can't dismiss abstract art as a whole for these reasons.

Image: Petra Tornado

To conclude, I'd like to share a quote from a brilliant thinker: Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire was a poet, activist, critic, celebrity, and free spirit who knew and was allied with Picasso and other great modern artists to be in Paris during the early 20th Century. He saw the greatness of many of these artists before most anyone else and, in some cases, is heavily responsible for us knowing about them at all. He even is credited with inventing the word 'surrealism'. He wrote extensively about modern art and, in his awesome essay 'On the Subject of Modern Painting' (written in 1912), he does the best job I've ever read of explaining why modern art and by extension, abstract art, is legitimate.

"If the aim of painting has remained what it always was - namely, to give pleasure to the eye - the works of the new painters require the viewer to find in them a different kind of pleasure from the one he can just as easily find in the spectacle of nature...In listening to a concert, the music-lover experiences a joy qualitatively different from that he experiences in listening to natural sounds, such as the murmur of a stream, the rushing of a torrent, the whistling of the wind in the forest, or to the harmonies of a human language founded on reason and not on aesthetics. Similarly, the new painters provide their admirers with artistic sensations due exclusively to the harmony of lights and shades and independent of the subject depicted in the picture."

Excellent food for thought. Thanks Guillaume!

Paris (Day 2, Part 2) - Pompidou Centre

Pompidou Centre

As everyone knows, Paris was the hub of the art world for many decades. So traveling here means museums are going to be on your itinerary. This is where Jim and I ran into some problems. Jim is fine with museums and looking at art, but our opinions about art diverge a lot as we get into modern and contemporary works. Further, if left to my own devices, I could have happily spent all nine days gliding around the various Parisian museums and galleries, soaking up art. Jim is not interested in standing around all day looking at paintings.

Many say the secret of a successful relationship is compromise, and I suppose we were a model of this during our afternoon at Pompidou Centre. After cruising the modern art floor (probably too much time for Jim's taste), he was in no mood to check out the contemporary art floor. On my side, I would have spent much more time on the modern floor and then happily have tackled the contemporary stuff.  This is the inherent flaw in compromise. While everyone gets to influence the decision, the final decision doesn't make anyone really happy.

Personally, I think Jim and I should have seen this coming and planned for it. Just because we're a couple doesn't mean we do everything together. We're a couple, not Siamese twins! On a trip like this, why not have a day where we take off on separate trajectories? It certainly wouldn't have taken much thought to find something Jim would have enjoyed more than several hours of Matisse, Mondrian, and Braque. At the end of the day, we could meet at some great restaurant for dinner to regale each other with our adventures. So much better for everyone! Oh well, hindsight is 20-20.

Le Luxe I, 1907
Henri Matisse
Oil on canvas, 210 x 138 cm

If you're not a Matisse fanboy (or girl), I suggest you stop reading this post right now because I promise there is nothing of interest here for you.

I learned a great deal seeing some Matisse works in person. But then one always does learn more about art by seeing the real deal rather than pictures in a book or magazine. Photos often fail to get the colors exactly right, rarely convey the scale of the piece, and usually lose the texture of paint application. As a result, it's not wrong to say that a photo of a painting can be visually inaccurate.

The Matisse paintings at Pompidou Centre are an example of the inferior viewing experience provided by photographs of art. In photographs, Matisse's work takes on a solid, colorful appearance. Sort of like icons. The actual works are not this clean or simple. The colors are there, but the roughness of the brushstrokes are surprising if all you've seen are photos.

Matisse - like many modern artists - wasn't especially concerned about polish. Often, he wasn't even concerned about covering his entire canvas. You can see the lack of overt finesse in the way fields of color are sometimes not blended. There are also many places on his canvasses where brushstrokes were low on paint and leave most of the canvas or underlying color exposed. It appears Matisse made little attempt to hide these artifacts of his painting process.

I also wonder about how Matisse prepared his canvasses (or if he did). Standing before the actual works, you can see that some of the exposed areas are filthy. Not sure if that's due to a lack of priming or an issue with the history of the paintings. Also, in many works, Matisse's fields of color are cracked, which seems odd given the relative youth of these paintings. Not sure what that's all about, but it's interesting information to have in understanding the works and how they were made.

And this was just my experience with Matisse's works! The Pompidou's modern art floor had plenty of Cubism, Surrealism, Color Field, and installation works, including a Rothko and a Mitchell. Just too much to appreciate in a few short hours!

After we left the museum ('escaped' might be the word Jim would use), we went for dinner at a cafe just down the street. We were both dead tired by this point and were happy to relax with some wine and watch the world go by.

Jim enjoying a well-deserved meal and rest!

More Poetry Inspired by Art

La branche de fleurs, 1906
Henri Matisse
Oil on canvas, 40 x 31.8 cm

Here's another poem I wrote back in 1999 that was inspired by a work or art. This time my muse was Henri Matisse and a much less well-known work of his: Branch of Flowers. There's no quality photos of this work, so I snapped this photo from a Matisse retrospective I own (so the quality is not the greatest).

Matisse is one of my favorite artists, largely due to his use of color, and it's pretty obvious my own approach to art references his style pretty heavily. I also admire how his work evolved over the course of his life, and that he tried new things. Also, his creativity was unstoppable. Late in his life (I believe he could no longer work at an easel), he switched to cutting out colored paper and creating collages. He had an innate need to visually express himself.

Branch of Flowers

Laughing vivacious
she pauses
eyes lowered
over a branch
of magnolia blossoms
as delicate
as her hand
as white
as her skin

Thoughts in her face
and magnolias
joined and freed
to fly forever
in my memory
like birds

- Peter Cholewinski

"You can't be afraid to suck..."

Three Jonquils, 2013
Peter Cholewinski
Oil pastel on paper, 22.9 x 30.5 cm

For the first time in a while, I spent some time drawing. It was mainly to preserve some sense that I'm trying to keep at my work with oil pastels. I did a few contour drawings of some jonquils Jim had picked from the garden and put in a vase, and then I tried my hand at an oil pastel. The result is posted here, and I'm not at all happy with it.

So why am I posting it?

Mainly because it's less important that I did something good than that I did something. Drawing is like building your biceps; you gotta work at it. I'm quite 'out of shape' as an artist, and a crummy workout is always better than no workout at all. So I'm glad I pushed myself. Yay me!

The other reason comes from some advice I got from my friend Gretchen, who is a real artist (and a videographer to boot). Back in 1999, I enrolled in studio painting and began working with oils for the first time. I didn't have any idea what I was doing, and it was exciting. After my first dozen pieces, I remember being very frustrated and complaining to Gretchen that everything I was doing sucked. She told me: "Look, you can't be afraid to suck. If you are, then you'll never learn anything." Realizing she was right, I stopped whining and being precious and pushed on.  No pain; no gain. I continued to churn out crap, but I was getting critiques and being exposed to different techniques. Practice helped and I was building my oil painting muscles. A year or so later, I had a picture in a show - a good one - and sold it.

So here's the reason for the post. What I learned from acting on the 'you can't be afraid to suck' advice is that sucking or, to be more specific, failure is just fine as long as I learn from my failures. Posting this is a way for me to even more objectively react to my work. So, let's get to it.  What's wrong with Three Jonquils?

• Composition is poor - There is no dynamism here. The forms have no energy and do not interact with each other. This gives the piece a flat feel, like it just sort of sits there and makes it impossible for the piece to 'grab' the viewer.
• Background is too much - It overpowers the subject and, even worse, there is no relationship between the colors chosen and the subject. I tried to use complements (red behind the green stems and purple behind some of the yellow flowers) but the tones are somehow off. Too dark and rich. The background also lacks the variation in color and intensity needed for it to breathe. 
• Flowers and stems lack finesse - There's not enough variation in color in the petals, and there's no suggestion of form aside from the outlines. The darker background should have been used to provide this outlining, but it was not. The lowest of the three flowers is best, and the one on top has some electric green along the petal edges that is the beginning of something interesting. But it doesn't go far enough. 
• Trite colors - Not enough mixing and shades/hues to deliver something other than 'GREEN stems' and 'YELLOW flowers'. This is probably due to me using different pastels from the ones I used on Blue Vase. This is a big failure for me, since color is probably the best thing I bring to the table as an artist. If I miss there, then I have little chance of success.

Bottom line, a sense of looseness or play would have gone a long way to making this piece interesting and/or dynamic. As it is it's sterile and dull. So I need to play with the new oil pastels I have, get to know how they work and blend, decide if I like them as a tool, and also just draw more to redevelop that sense of confidence and looseness that comes with being an 'in-shape' artist.

Poetry Inspired by Art

Still Life Before an Open Window: Place Ravignan, 1915
Juan Gris
Oil on canvas, 166 x 89 cm

During National Poetry Month I post pieces from some of my favorite poets. I also dig into my journals for stuff from my past. In early 1999, I did something that I'd never done up to that point and which I have never done again: used great works of art as inspiration for poetry. 'Premonition' came very quickly (in only two drafts) as a result of my response to this painting by cubist Juan Gris, and it was published that year in a small press publication.

The photo here is big enough so that if you click on it you can see an enlarged version.

Premonition

No more wine or bread

Headlines of insanity

Marguerite plays violin -

a sombre vibrato

falling from our balcony

with autumn leaves

to the crowded boulevard

unheeded

For a moment

the boulevard

the town itself

this sunset and empty wine glass

the violin and newspaper

our crisp white tablecloth

pulse with a nausea

of some madman's creation

- Peter Cholewinski

Signs of Zealotry?

Okay. Just to forewarn you, this post could easily be filed under "Dude, really? Just chill out!"

I have learned a great deal from Zen Buddhism, and I love how it's impacted my outlook and the way I respond to things. However, there's a thin line between zeal and zealotry.  While reading Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (my current read), I questioned whether I was potentially showing signs of the latter.

sumi painting depicting nen

As usual (at least in my paperback books), as I read I was making notes in the margins. As I was reading a passage in chapter nine of Against Nature detailing the chaotic mood swings the main character, Des Esseintes, has within the illusionary world he has created for himself, I realized my notes were commenting on his state of mind by referencing the Zen concept of delusion. I was also thinking about him in terms of the famous sumi painting that reflects the concept of first, second, and third nen (see picture). Semi-translation: I was thinking about how Des Esseintes had backed so far away from direct perception of reality that he was lost entirely in delusion. Lost to the point of going a bit nuts.

It occurred to me this was not the first time I'd reacted to art, music, or literature from a Zen perspective. For example, one of the reasons I love Mark Rothko is because his paintings are like visually experiencing samadhi. My entry on Laura Nyro's song "Trees of the Ages" and my post on Zen Buddhism and Existentialism display the influence of Zen in my reactions to music and literature. I even asked myself: "Since there are schools of aesthetic criticism for feminists and socialists and objectivists, why not a school of Zen Buddhist literary or art criticism?"

That thought gave me pause. Do I really want my perceptions colored so deeply? Maybe I'm slowly turning into a 'born-again Zen Buddhist', someone who can't experience anything except through a narrow lens? In other words, was I becoming overzealous about things? As usual with thoughts like this that can't be answered in the moment you have them, I shrugged and pulled out my Scarlet O'Hara routine: 'I'll think about that tomorrow". Except I actually do think about it tomorrow! LOL!

Long story short, I think the definition of a zealot isn't that you let yourself be deeply influenced by something. A zealot is someone who is closed to abandoning what they believe in the light of evidence that it's wrong and, worse, who condemns anything that doesn't fit or agree with the truth they think they've found simply because it doesn't fit or agree. Since that's not what I'm doing, I'm okay.

That's a relief! Because I kinda like the idea of a school of Zen literary criticism!

Jean Moreas - 'The Symbolist Manifesto' (1886)

Jean Moreas

The next two books on my reading list are Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach and Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I was led to the books while reading an article in Apollo magazine (on of the art mags I subscribe to). I forget which article. Anyway since these are both Symbolist novels, I thought I would post The Symbolist Manifesto by Jean Moreas.

I didn't really know very much about Symbolism but, in getting to know more about it, I ran across this quote from French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme: "Paint not the thing itself but the effect that it produces." As I've read more, I've sensed that Symbolism may have been one of the movements that ultimately launched the trajectory of modern art that fueled movements like Fauvism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Dada. The movement was embraced by novelists and poets, as well as artists and seems to embrace the decadent, the ornate, the wordy, and the imagination. The mythic image of Edgar Allen Poe is very much part of the Symbolist ethos.

I lifted this translation from the website Mutable Sound. As some of the sentences seem a little odd, I'm thinking this was either translated a long time ago or is simply a somewhat indifferent translation. But who cares? Stuff like this needs to be preserved in some form! Enjoy (I've included examples of Symbolist art throughout the post).

Gustave Moreau, Young Thracian Woman
Carrying the Head of Orpheus

The Symbolist Manifesto by Jean Moreas (translator: C. Liszt)

As with all arts, literature evolves: a cyclical evolution with strictly determined returns and which become more complicated of various modifications brought by the step of time and the confusion of circles. It would be superfluous to point out that every new progressive stage of art corresponds exactly to senile degeneration, at the ineluctable end of the immediately previous school. Two examples will be enough: Ronsard triumphs over the impotence of the last impressionists of Marot, Romanticism unfurls its royal flag on the classical debris badly kept by Casimir Delavigne and Steven de Jouy. It is because any demonstration of art succeeds inevitably in becoming impoverished, in exhausting itself; then, of copy in copy, simulation in simulation, what was full of sap and freshness becomes dried out and shriveled; what was the new and the unprompted becomes banal and commonplace.

So Romanticism, having sounded all the tumultuous warning bells of uprising, had its days of glory and battle, lost of its force and its favour, abdicated its heroic boldness, became ordered and classified, sceptical and full of common sense; in the honorable and mean-minded attempts of the Parnassians, Romanticism hoped for a false resurgence, only finally, such a monarch had to fall into senile decay, and in the end was only able to be dethroned for the naturalism in which one could grant seriously a value of protest only, legitimate but poorly advised, against the insipidity of some novelists then in fashion.

One waited for a new manifestation of art therefore, necessary, unavoidable. This manifestation, brooded for a long time, has just hatched. And every insignificant practical joke of the cheery-eyed press, all the anxieties of the serious critics, every bad mood of the surprised public in its sheepish carelessness, are only bringing about this actual evolution in french letters more and more every day, this evolution which impatient judges have noted to be, by an incredible antinomy, decadent. However, decadent literature is principally tough, stringy, timorous and servile: all the tragedies of Voltaire, for instance, are marked with these signs of decadence. And for what of these reproaches can be claimed as regards the new school? The abuse of pomp, strangeness of metaphor, a new vocabulary or harmony go together with colours and lines: characteristics of any revival.

We have already offered the name of symbolism as the only one able of indicating reasonably the actual tendencies of the creative mind in art. This name can be supported.

It was said at the beginning of this article that the developments of art offer cyclical extremely complicated differences: for example, to track the exact parentage of the new school we should go back to certain poems of Alfred de Vigny, and on up to Shakespeare, even mystical, even further. These issues would require a volume of reviews, saying that Charles Baudelaire therefore must be considered the true forerunner of the current movement, Mr. Stéphane Mallarmé subdivides the sense of mystery and the ineffable Mr. Paul Verlaine broke his honor in the cruel hindrances to poetry that the prestigious fingers of Mr Theodore de Banville had softened up before him. But the Supreme enchantment is not yet consummated: a persistent and jealous labor invites newcomers.

***

Enemy of education, declamation, wrong feelings, objective description, symbolist poetry tries to dress the Idea in a sensitive form which, however, would not be its sole purpose, but furthermore that, while serving to express the Idea in itself, would remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, should not be allowed to be seen deprived of the sumptuous lounge robes of extraneous analogies; because the essential character of symbolic art consists in never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself. So, in this art, the pictures of nature, the actions of human beings, all concrete phenomena would not themselves know how to manifest themselves; these are presented as the sensitive appearance destined to represent their esoteric affinity with primordial Ideas.

The accusation of obscurity that has been made as regards such aesthetics by readers with broken staffs is not surprising. But what do we make of this? The Pythian Odes of Pindar, Hamlet of Shakespeare, the Vita Nuova of Dante, the Second Faust of Goethe, the Temptation of Saint-Antoine of Flaubert were not they also taxed by ambiguity?

For the precise translation of its synthesis, it is necessary for symbolism to take on an archetypal and complex style; of unpolluted terms, periods which brace themselves alternating with periods of undulating lapses, significant pleonasms, mysterious ellipses, outstanding anacoluthia, any audacious and multiform surplus; finally the good language – instituted and updated–, good and luxuriant and energetic french language from before Vaugelas and Boileau-Despréaux, the language of François Rabelais and Philippe de Commines, Villon, Ruteboeuf and so many other free writers hurling their acute language in the same manner as the Toxotes of Thrace hurled their snaky arrows.

Rhythm: the ancient metric enlivened; a chaos learnedly ordered; the rhyme illucescente and beaten as a buckler of gold and bronze, to rhymes of unintelligible fluidity; the alexandrine with numerous and mobile stopping; the job of first certain numbers – seven, nine, eleven, thirteen – bold in the various rhythmic combinations of which they are the price.

***

Here I ask the permission of you to act out my small INTERMEZZO drawn from a precious book: The Treaty of French Poetry, where Mr Theodore de Banville made to relentlessly incite, such the God of Claros, monstrous donkey ears on the head of many a Midas.

Attention!

John William Waterhouse, The Crystal Ball

The figures who speak in the room are:
A DETRACTOR OF The SYMBOLIC SCHOOL
MR THEODORE DE BANVILLE
ERATO

THE DETRACTOR. – oh! these decadent! What a grandiloquence! What a rigmarole! Our grand Molière was right when he said:

This style represents a vainglory which they call

Fate of good character and the truth.

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – our grand Molière describes two evils towards which they themselves bring out as many good characters as possible. Of what good character? Of what truth? Apparent disorder, bright insanity, passionate grandiloquence are the truth of lyric poetry. To fall in the excess of figures and colour, the evil is not great and it is not thereabouts that our literature will perish. In the most poor days, when it expires undoubtedly, as for instance under the first Empire, it is not grandiloquence and abuse of the ornaments which kill it, it is the platitude. Taste and the natural are nice things surely less useful in poetry than they think. The Romeo and Juliet of Shakespeare is throughout written in a style as affected as that of the marquis of Mascarille; that of Ducis shines with the happiest and most natural simplicity.

THE DETRACTOR. – but the caesura, the caesura! They violate the caesura!!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – in his remarkable prosody published in 1844, Mr Wilhem Tenint establishes that Alexandrine poetry accepts twelve different combinations, on the basis of poetry with its caesura after the first syllable, to arrive at poetry which has its caesura after the eleventh syllable. It amounts to saying that in reality the caesura can be put after any syllable of Alexandrine poetry. Also, it establishes that it is acceptable to have poems with caesuras after the sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth, or tenth syllables, of all manner of variety and diverse placement. Let us go further: let us dare to proclaim complete freedom and say that in these complex questions the ear decides alone. They perish always without ever having been too audacious but rather not having been audacious enough.

THE DETRACTOR. – terror! You do not respect the alternation of rhymes! You know, Mister, that the decadent dare to afford even gaps! even gaps!!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – gaps, the diphthong clearing up syllables in the poem, all other things which were forbidden and especially the facultative job of the masculine and female rhymes provides the poet of genius one thousand means to create delicate effects always various, unforeseen, and bottomless. But to use this complicated and learned poetry, genius and a musical ear is needed, while with the fixed rules, the most mediocre writers can, by obeying them truthfully, make, alas! fairly good poems! Who therefore earned anything in the regulation of poetry? The mediocre poets. Themselves!

THE DETRACTOR. – it seems to me however that the romantic revolution…

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – Romanticism was an incomplete revolution. Whatever misfortune Victor Hugo, that victorious Hercules with his bloody hands, is not an absolute revolutionary. He let live a party of monsters who were his responsibility to exterminate with his arrows of fire!

THE DETRACTOR. – any renovation is madness! The simulation of Victor Hugo, here is the starting point of french poetry!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – when Hugo emancipated poetry, those who taught using his example had to think the poets to come would like him be free and only constrained by they themselves. But this has become for us a love of servitude which the new poets have copied and imitated in their envy for his forms, the combinations, the chalice, the further habits of Hugo, rather than endeavoring to find the new. That’s how, manufactured for the yoke, we fall again from one serfhood into another one. After the classical banality, there was the romantic banality, the banality of the chalice, the banality of sentences, the banality of rhymes; and the banality, that is to say the commonplace become a compulsive thing, in poetry as anywhere else, it is Death. Contrariwise, let us dare to live! and to live it is to sniff the air of the sky and not the breath of our neighbour, this neighbour he should be a God!

Scène II

(Invisible) ERATO. – your Treaty of French Poetry is a delightful, chief work Banville. But the young poets have some blood until with eyes battling against monsters they graze by the side of Nicolas Boileau; they claim you in the field of honour, and you are silent mister Banville!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE (dreamer). – curse! I would have failed in my duty of elder and of lyricist!

(The author of the Exiles pushes out a pitiful sigh and the intermezzo finishes.)

***

Prose – novels, news, stories, fancies, – evolves in a similar sense as does the poem. Elements, seemingly heterogeneous, coincide in that place: Stendhal brings the translucent psychology, Balzac the swelling vision, Flaubert the cadenzas of sentences in ample volutes. Mr Edmund de Goncourt his evocative modernist impressionism.

The comprehension of the symbolic novel is polymorphous: sometimes a unique figure moves in circles distorted by his clean hallucinations, his constitution; in this distortion lies the only reality. Beings in a mechanical gesture, in shaded silhouettes, fidget around the unique personage: these are to him only pretexts to feeling and to guess-work. This in itself is a tragic or farcical mask, of a humanity nevertheless perfect although rational. – sometimes the mob, superficially affected by the ensemble of ambient representations, itself borne along with these alternatives, these conflicts and stagnances towards acts which will abide in incompletion. By instants, individual wills manifest themselves; they earn, gather together, spread for a purpose which, attained or missed, disperses them in the primitive elements. – Sometimes mythical recalled fantasies, from ancient Démogorgôn through Bélial, from Kabires through Nigromans, appear sumptuously grouped on the rock of Caliban or by the forest of Titania in mixolydian modes of the barbitons and octocordes.

So contemptuous of the babyish method of naturalism, – Mr Zola, shone, was saved by his marvellous writer’s instinct – the symbolic novel – impressionism will build up its edifice of subjective perversion, based on this axiom: that art would not know how to search into the objective, what an extremely succinct and simple starting point.

Ferdinand Hodler, Night

Staycation Success

To sum up: I kept very busy the first several days of this third Pete Retreat, but then I took it easy on the last day. After all, time off is supposed to be a mental break!

On Wednesday, I went into the city and had fun. Went shopping at an independent record store and spent an hour exploring the dusty shelves of a used book dealer. Then took the el to River North for gallery hopping. Gretchen joined me here. Unfortunately, the artist whose work I went to view turned out to be much less impressive 'in the flesh'. I often find that photos of art often do not accurately represent them. There is always some distortion. Perhaps an impasto technique the camera can't capture or the colors are faded compared to the actual piece. There's always something.

In this case, the artist in question uses metallic paint sparingly on his canvases. This did not show up in the photos I had seen. Personal taste: I dislike metallic paints, as I it makes a work look glitzy in a cheap way (sort of on a par with black velvet art). There was another artist at the gallery whose work I liked, but it doesn't fit with my sense of what I want to buy. So there seems little point in doing more than just appreciating it.

We ended up going to another gallery, that was about 'crafts' rather than painting. Here I found some really exciting work. In fact, there were five artists that jumped out at me and none of them were painters. One worked in fiber/paper, while the others worked in ceramics to fashion vessels, vases, and wall decorations. Although they had very different approaches, what they had in common was an element of nature as basic inspiration yet, despite this starting point, they abstract the inspiration rather than directly reproduce it.

Positively, it wasn't until after I had homed in on which works I liked on a gut level that I realized it was all part of the same aesthetic I respond to when I look at paintings. Also positive was that this aesthetic spoke to me in forms of art beyond painting. This taught me that I can have a much more varied and rich collection by including pieces from multiple traditions. I'm definitely figuring things out!

After gallery hopping, Gretchen and I sat outside and drank too much while people watching. We also got a chance to talk tons and peruse the free Chicago art scene magazines we had picked up. It was a beautiful day, and we just relaxed until it was time to head up north for dinner with Gretchen's partner Camilo. Then Gretchen gave me the tour of the commune she lives in, providing encouraging feedback on my vase picture, and showed me her reel. A long, busy, and fun day.

After all this activity, I decided to have a slowed down kind of day yesterday. I did a 22 mile bike ride (see prior post), practiced piano, did a little writing, and shopped for art supplies and music. At the art supply store, I got extra oil pastels. I never knew this, but the crayons also come in a large size, and I realized these would be useful for the same reason I bought extra large tubes of white and black oils when I was painting. You know you're going to use it, so buying the small tubes is just inefficient. So, now, I'm equipped for more work!

I had lunch with my friend Paul, but he had to beat the rush hour so I wasn't able to get him to sit for me. (Maybe the fact I told him I had no idea whether the output was going to be any good scared him off!). Then Jimmy returned and we went out for dinner to celebrate his homecoming. I got to show him the photos I took of the works I was interested in.

All in all, I feel rested but also that I accomplished something meaningful in this time off. Best part is...I still have three more days to play!

Staycation: Day 1 Results

Day 1 was definitely a success; I was relaxed and happy without turning into a slothful heap.  I'm up to item 9 on my list from the prior post. However, since I've checked off the majority of the list I think I'm free to blow off the rest and do whatever I want. Clearly I spent more than ten minutes in a rational manner, and I must give myself props for completing the heinous task of cleaning my desk

What I'm most happy about, though, is that I finally started drawing again! I set myself very low goals: I was just going to do some contour drawings to get back into it. I was not trying to create anything 'good'. So I just took a newsprint pad, a black wax pastel crayon, and wandered around the house drawing any random subject matter.  Since I was just retraining my eye, the actual subject matter was beside the point. I drew a candlestick, then a dish hanging on the wall, and then a bit of drape. I even drew it all on one sheet, creating an interesting - if odd - still life of sorts. I drew my cat (and the less said about that the better). Then I wandered into the entry way and drew a plant in the garden. It was so process-oriented that it hardly felt creative, but it was what I needed to do.

Blue Vase, 2012 Peter Cholewinski
Oil pastel on newsprint, 9 x 12"

Then I started drawing a blue glass vase on a table in the entryway and...for some reason I suddenly got really into what I was doing! The light reflecting on the glass, the different shades of blue, the curves of the vase...it all just sparked something in me. I completed the picture and ran to my study to get my oil pastels so I could add color. I did a foreground, the background, and made a full-on picture. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes and...I'm happy with it! Here it is (click the picture if you want to see it bigger).

Now, I'm not posting this because it's brilliant. The composition is totally off (no space at the top and too much at the bottom). The treatment of the vase is not accurate enough to be representational, yet it's not abstract enough to provide any psychological depth. The line separating the background from the table the vase is sitting on is way too harsh (even after I softened it) and distracts from the vase itself. The foreground is too flat (another color and technique in there would have broken it up nicely). Even so, I'm happy with this picture. I like that it just sorta 'happened'. I like the roughness and looseness of the approach (largely a result of the fact that it was too spontaneous for me to realize I was actually doing something creative). Best of all, I like the colors and the layering of tones.

I have little to no experience using pastel crayons, nor did I 'follow the rules' while doing the contour drawing that started this. However, that's not relevant. What matters is that I'm learning and, if I keep at it, I will only improve from here. The main things I learned are that subject matter with color is what fires me up and that I like pastel crayons as a tool. They allow a degree of immediacy I haven't experienced even in oil painting.

I hope I stick with this; the feeling of release I had when I was done and my hands were smeared with color was almost euphoric.

What Do I Want to Collect?

some of Greta Garbo's amazing collection
photo: Billy Cunningham, Architectural Digest

So now that I've decided to be an art collector, the question is what do I want to collect and why?

These are not academic questions. The world of art is vast, and it's important to understand what I want and even more important to be able to talk about why I purchased it. To just randomly buy whatever strikes my fancy at a given moment means that I will end up with a pile of unrelated paintings rather than a collection.

Of course, at bottom, my purchases would always have one thing in common: I liked them. This is bound to provide some sense of unity, but I feel it would only be a very loose sense of unity. It would be like going clothes shopping and just buying whatever looked good. When I go to get dressed, I'd find I have too many blue shirts (because I like blue) or that I can't pair up enough items into good outfits.

So the downside of 'flying blind' in my collecting is that I'm not really being intelligent about my purchases. I would never know if I was buying a painting for a good reason or just because something in the painting struck my whim or was a hot fad. And, as we sometimes learn the hard way in clothes shopping, today's whim/fad is tomorrow's 'what was I thinking?'

Developing a conscious aesthetic or strategy in my purchases has positive side effects beyond avoiding buyer's remorse. For example, as I have begun to think this through, I feel as though it brings me more in touch with my reactions to art in general, especially when I don't like something. Knowing what my cup of tea is helps me check myself to make sure my negative reaction to a work isn't limited to the fact that the piece has a different 'flavor' that what I prefer. This keeps me open.

Mark Rothko painting
photo: Karmic Voyager blog

An example of how this works is when I found an artist whose works I really liked but from whom I must never, ever buy anything. This artist does abstract paintings featuring several large shapes (usually rectangles) in different colors floating against a background using a third color. I liked the artist's work a great deal but will never, ever buy it. Why not?

The works I just described were painted within the last several years, but they strongly resemble the work of Mark Rothko (the picture of his work here was lifted from a post on the blog Karmic Voyager). Now, if I want to buy a work of this kind, why would I buy anything other than an actual Rothko? (Practically speaking, the answer to that question is that I'll never in my wildest dreams be able to afford it...but I digress).

All artists stand on the shoulders of someone (or several someones). However, I distinguish between someone standing on the shoulders of Mark Rothko and reaching for something beyond him or adding something of their own to translate his legacy into something new...versus a person who is regurgitating his vision and style. The latter is not good art (at least not good beyond the decorative sense). If I'm only responding to the work from a decorative standpoint, then I do not need to be paying fine art prices to get something that serves that need.

This is somewhat random smattering of thoughts on this subject, but deciding what I collect and why is necessary both to be a responsible buyer and to truly get the most out of my experience with what I buy (and out of art in general). Going to galleries and museums will help me evolve my thinking.

More on this as I start figuring things out...

Back to Art?

Self-Portrait, 1997 Peter Cholewinski
Oil pastel crayons on paper, 17 x 13"

As I've mentioned on this blog (more than) a few times, I'd gotten away from the arts and being creative several years ago. I've been more focused on athletic stuff: martial arts, swimming, lifting, biking, and trying new things like hiking, kayaking, and rock wall climbing.

This past year, however, I've felt my interest in the arts coming back. It's why I've been playing piano and consistently reading literature again. At the same time, my creativity also seems to be slowly returning. Every so often I feel an urge to draw. Not sure how to describe it; it's like a tingling inside of me when I see certain colors or shapes.

Perhaps part of it is the amount of reading I've been doing about painting and artists over the last year. In any case, I have some ideas about what I'd like to do and how I'd like to do it. So I bought a pad of newsprint and a black wax pastel crayon. I figured I would start with some contour drawing to retrain my eye. Then we'll see where things go.

The picture here is a self-portrait I did back in 1997. It was one of those pictures that just came out of me, and I think it only took twenty minutes to create. It had been a tense day, and the jagged loose technique I used with my oil pastel crayons was just what I needed as a release. While I'm not crazy about how I did the background and the shirt and hair are too flat, the use of color makes this one of my favorite things I've done.

Perhaps this is something to tackle during the Pete Retreat Staycation?

The First Acquisition

Buying 'Summer' and 'Fall' at the Timmel Collection, Saugatuck, MI

Jim and I spent the past weekend celebrating our 16th anniversary in Saugatuck, Michigan. We hadn't been there in over a decade, I believe, so it was a good time to go back for a short getaway. We had a very nice stay, but what the most memorable part of the trip will be that - after a good deal of reading up on art collecting and consideration about actually doing it - I finally took the plunge and made my first purchase!

Or I should say 'purchases'!  I picked up two paintings by Chicago-area artist Darren Jones. I hadn't planned on buying anything of this kind during this trip. I'd just figured I was going to bum around the shops and have a nice anniversary weekend. Although we were planning to gallery hop, I figured I would do my usual lurker routine: walking around, salivating over a few items, but not daring to buy anything.

Of course, I'd been giving collecting serious thought after it occurred to me that I would be interested in it as a...passion ('hobby' seems like such a poor word for this). I'd also done a good bit of reading on the subject, as well as getting back into learning about what was going on in contemporary art. How do people collect? What things do you keep in mind in choosing a piece? A big part of this was reading interviews with major fine art collectors and hearing them relate how they got started and what drives them. Still, each time I considered making a purchase, there was this hesitation and I'd walk away empty-handed. Art is not cheap, and I feared a painful bout of buyer's remorse if I regretted my purchase later.

This time, however, things were different. Of course I really liked the work by Darren Jones that I saw at the Timmel Collection in downtown Saugatuck, but I'd liked a lot of other things too and not pulled the trigger. The difference was that, after we left the gallery the first time and I had not bought, I was filled by a sense of futility and frustration. Like a diver at the end of the springboard, afraid to take the plunge. We've been in our house 14 years and there are a lot of walls with no artwork or artwork that I'm not all that crazy about. Why was I allowing this? What was I waiting for?

Spring, 2010 Darren Jones Mixed medium, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”

While Jim and I were at lunch I talked the whole thing through with him. One: I had done a quick web investigation and checked out Jones' website and artist statement. Liked what I read. Check.  Two: I'm not being a flake about this. I have a god deal of art education, and I know what I like (and, far more importantly, why I like it), so I'm not going to buy something dreadful. Check. Three: All the collectors I read about emphasized you have to start with what you like, even as they each evolved their collections into something with a (sometimes very tight) focus. These paintings definitely fit with what I like about and respond to in art. Check. Four: I was not buying these paintings as an investment or with the dream of making a fortune when Jones became the next Big Artist, died, and all his works soared into the six-figure range for auction estimates. I was buying them to have something in my home that I enjoy, that has personal meaning for me, and that I think are beautiful. Check. Five: I could think of several places in the house the paintings could go, so there was a definite functional aspect to this purchase. Check. Six: The idea of two pieces of a similar style and yet with the sharp color contrast these two works have adds to the appeal. Check. Lots of good reasons.

Done. Went in, made the purchase, and I have to say I had such a rush afterwards! Buying a painting may not seem like a big deal but, if you love art and are serious about what you are buying, I assure you it is a very big deal! I made the artist working at the gallery who helped us with the purchase (he's not Darren Jones) get into the picture above with me. Yes, I geeked out. But this is a first step into a larger world, so I had no desire to restrain myself from geeking out. I've made a life-long passion into something concrete, and that makes me very happy.


Fall, 2010 Darren Jones
Mixed medium, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”



Gallery B1E & Gretchen Hasse

Gretchen Hasse "Couple Number 1"

Went to the city yesterday and hung out with Gretchen, my artist/videographer pal who gets involved in a wide range of social causes and lives it what sounds like a really awesome commune. Anyway, her work is hanging in Gallery B1E in Rogers Park.  It was a good space in a juicy location. Here's a link to a video about the gallery and some of it's artists (I'm not real crazy about the interviewer's questions): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBucR1NlQ7U . I don't know that I spent much time (if any) in Rogers Park when I lived in Chicago, but its an interesting and extremely diverse place with what feels like an active arts community.

So I went to see Gretchen and check out her work and the gallery itself. I have one of her pieces posted here, which I picked because I have always loved her figure drawing technique. Here's Gretchen's website, if you want to see more: http://gretchenhasse.com/home.html. Beyond the piece I have here, Gretchen had a good range of stuff on display, including photography and several urban scenes using distressed windows with panes of glass as frames. This gave the impression of looking out the window at a view, which in some of the pieces created an interesting tension between the mundane idea of looking out a window and the collage-like compositions which not always are meant to be a cohesive whole and/or have a clear tie to representation.  It wasn't at all gimmcky, because the color and texture of the window frames made them an organic part of the work. We drank in her work and the work of some of the two other artists on display. One was a painter using a lot more color than Gretchen does and the other was a sculptor. It was good that the work was unrelated, as it provided a broader range of visual experience. 

Then we moved out to have dinner. We found a tiny Persian restaurant with really friendly staff called Masouleh, and we enjoyed a pleasant dinner. We chatted about her video and artwork, I provided some input on her story arc and cells from a comic she is planning, I revealed my efforts on a nascent script for a horror short called 'Revenant', and I shared my experiences learning some new sonatinas on piano.  You know 'girl talk'.

We noticed a restaurant called Den Den just down the street...with Eritrean cuisine! Never had that, though I would suspect it may be similar to Ethiopian given the geography. Definitely need to give that a whirl! There was also a Peruvian restaurant too. I think we'll be back to Rogers Park.

Dry Pastels. Better Than Oil.

The oil painting thing just isn't working. I freak out every time I clean my brushes because I have to do it in the kitchen sink. I can so easily see myself doing something really disastrous to the kitchen. Plus it's probably really bad environmentally to be disposing of oils that way. So I was in this quandary. Do I need to pay rent for a studio space to continue? Then all of the sudden it hit me. Why am I stuck on oils? Why not use dry pastel crayons? I still have my supply.

I went on the web and got some ideas about how to work with them and then started on my first piece. So how was it? Well, I really enjoyed it. There is a bit of a painterly feeling to how you use them in terms of laying the colors on. Then again, it really is a different process in how they work because there is also a drawing feel to the experience. And...I really liked blending with my fingers and getting pigment all over my hands! Fun fun fun!

The piece I did was a landscape, but I was mostly just playing with how colors get laid out. Learning by doing. I was happy with the piece when it was done, but I refused to commit on a verdict until I put it away for a few days.  When I did come back, I could see it is not at all good. There's not enough variation in the tonality of the color, which makes the whole thing kind of flat and uninvolving. Also the perspective wasn't what I was after. But that's all fine. The first one or two dozen pieces are not going to be good. That's what happens when you're learning.  However, the fact that this medium works without me having a studio is good in terms of the likelihood of me continuing.

I was also struck - after coming back - that I perhaps I should use some fixative and continue laying down color. Maybe really labor over it. When I first began crafting my poetry rather than just writing them, I'd have work and rework poems, fix them, labor over the words I selected, write multiple drafts, etc. After a while, I developed a strong sense for how to work with poetry so that I didn't need to labor as hard to get what I was after. It's about honing the skill in using the tools you have in the medium.

The same is true with the dry pastels. I have to try to find time to keep doing it and just keep creating stuff and exploring how they work. Every piece I create, whether it's any good or not, will provide me with information on how to function. Kind of exciting and daunting all at once!

Back to Painting?

Years ago, I was way into painting. I took a bunch of college classes and built up a pretty good head of steam. I was painting somewhat large canvases (the one pictured  is 36x30), had placed my work in some shows, and even sold a piece...to a total stranger no less! I had gotten to a place where I was trying to merge the topics I was reading about in physics and biology texts into my art and naming them things that merged the art and science, as well. This piece was called 'Deep Sea Abstract Biogenesis'...or something like that.

I stopped painting pretty abruptly about the same time I stopped writing poetry. In general, there were a bunch of years where I simply didn't do anything creative anymore. Not entirely sure why that happened. I just didn't feel the urge to produce or communicate anything, and whenever I did try I had this feeling that the stuff I was creating was 'the same old same old'.

Over the past few week, however, I've had a return of what I can only call 'artist vision'. This is how it works: I'll be going along not thinking about anything when suddenly something very random and everyday that I see suggests a painting to me or a way to visually depict something through art. So this weekend I pulled my car out of the garage, fished my easel out of the crawl-space, took an inventory of my leftover supplies, picked up a few things I needed, made the garage into a studio, and started a canvas.

I have some ideas that I want to play with, but I veered away from them and instead did a quick sketch from my imagination of a bowl of avocados (don't ask why...it's the color I'm after) with a Cubist sensibility to the composition. I decided to paint this 'still life' as a way to get back on the saddle. Of course, I quickly learned that it's not quite that easy. I laid down my first couple layers of color and then remembered there's that pesky need for the paint to dry or you end up mixing on the canvas with everything you add!  This was why, when I was real active, I would have two or three paintings going on at once. I'd always get started on the next ones as I finished the current project, so that while one picture was drying I would always have something else to do.

Anyway, the first layers are down.  Who knows where this will go.  I've a had a few false restarts of my creative process over the years, and this may be just another one of them. I hope that this coming weekend I can get back to it and start on the actual painting.  But no matter what, I really enjoyed the process of painting again: the loose brushstrokes, the smells, the look of the paint on my palette, mixing colors, and the way it flows on the canvas. I even used my palette knife to slather paint on, so no worries that I'll revert back to some really uptight process.  I even (almost) enjoyed the way I somehow end up with every color I use on my fingers. I had fun!

Thwarted By The Heat

For the first time in a really long time, I pulled out some drawing supplies and went outside to sit and do some sketches. I always get the urge in the Spring, because Jim is always working in the garden planting new flowers guiding me around to show me he's moved stuff, and pointing out where new stuff is flowering.  There are so many colors, and I learned long ago that color is the main thing I respond to as a visual artist or art appreciator.

So out I went with my pad, my pastel crayons (wonderfully messy - I'm as fascinated by the mixture of colors that wind up smeared on my hands as a gypsy with a cup of tea leaves), and support materials (q-tips, charcoal, etc). I picked a spot, sat, and began laying out some flowers with contour drawing and then started adding the color in.

My contour drawings are the best ones I do, because whenever people make a loud comment about a drawing I've done it has always been the ones I do this way - working from real objects or people. However, the frustrating thing for me is that these drawings always look sloppy and half-baked to me. As a result, there is a very long time between starting a picture and working with it, when I am looking at it and thinking it's a total piece of crap. This is probably why I never pursued art; I just don't have the ability to see what I'm doing objectively.

Anyway, I was only able to work on it for a half and hour or so before the 90-degree heat and high humidity got to me. (I had wisely chosen to start this little project right around 1 or 2PM when the heat of the day is at its worst).  So I went back inside. Another reason I am not an artist; I lack that all consuming passion. The partially started picture is here in my study, really all ready for me to work again. I hope I do, but that day my attention strayed and I felt the urge to read some more.

On the plus side, I did go out and draw for the first time in years! I have forgotten how much I enjoy it; it's such an escape. I can shut out the whole world and enter a place - my drawing - that is all mine and consumes all my attention and thoughts.  At least for a little while!

Wolf Kahn

In my last post I referenced the artist Wolf Kahn so, since I really love his work, I thought I'd post an example. The first thing that attracted me to his work, of course, was his fantastic use of color. The picture here is a tamer one from him but, even here, you can see that he goes for the jugular with color. They are almost corrosive, like something you'd see flowing in a chemical spill that can eat through rubber. Yet, in his paintings, these colors are fully controlled and come to represent the intensity of light or the coolness of shadows. I also like that his use of color communicates a time of year or day, even though the colors are not at all what you would see in real life.

He seems to focus on landscapes, although his style and approach visually evoke the work of abstract expressionists. The harnessing of the freedom and psychology of abstract expressionism for something as traditional as landscape painting is a really interesting juxtaposition (how's that for the kind of arty-farty analysis like you'd find in a text book?). But I'm serious. I like abstract works, but I have to admit that there's something even more effective in a marriage of abstraction with the concrete. Perhaps this is because I feel that so much abstract art these days is more of a regurgitation of experiments that were done way back in the 40s and 50s. Anyone interested in a ANOTHER artist who does color field or 'splatter' paintings? Not me! I'd like to see something unique and innovative.

After art emancipated itself during the late 19th and 20th centuries, maybe it can back away from the need to rebel, react, or grandstand.

The Elgin Marbles

The Elgin Marbles are some of the remaining fragments of sculpture that originally were part of the Parthenon. They have been in the British Museum for something like 200 years. For the the last 30 years, Greece has asked that they be sent back to Greece, but the Brits have refused for a variety of reasons. The dialogue has gotten really heated in more recent years, with some who side with the Greeks even accusing the Brits of stealing the marbles from Greece. I have very strong view on this debate, and I'm going to air them here because no one I know has the least interest in discussing this subject with me.

First of all, the British did not steal the Elgin Marbles. The Museum's ownership of them is completely legal. On top of that, anyone who cares about the marbles should thank the British for acquiring them, as it is highly unlikely they would have survived to this day without the careful preservation and safety in which they have been kept by the British Museum. So there is no justification to call the Brits thieves (at least not in this case).

Further, even if the Brits did steal the marbles, Greece has no standing to demand their return. Britain acquired the marbles from the Ottomans (who controlled Greece at the time). I believe some feel that the Ottoman authorization shouldn't be valid since they had no vested interest in the antiquities of any country they were occupying. However, this position really just undermines the Greek position. The marbles belonged to the city state of Athens, so only the Athenian government would have any right to demand their return (as being the 'original owners'). But that government no longer exists.

So, the marbles belong to the Brits and they are justified to keep them as long as they like, especially since the Greeks have been so completely insulting about the whole thing. However...

Sometimes being 'right' doesn't mean you're doing the right thing. Despite the legality of the acquisition, the British Museum should return the marbles for a reason that transcends politics, nationalism, morals, and law. The marbles should go back to reunite - as much as can be done - a piece of art that should ideally never have been separated in the first place: the Parthenon.

The Parthenon is more than just a building; it is a piece of art that visually represents everything that ancient Athens stood for. It is a touchstone of heritage for the entire Western World. Now the British Museum often says that there's no point to return the marbles since they can never be reattached to the Parthenon. Maybe they can't be, but that's irrelevant. Seeing the marbles in the British Museum irretrievably divorces them them from their intended context. It would be like seeing the head of the 'David' statue - without the body - in a museum in Cleveland and expecting to get an feel for what the whole sculpture. It's impossible to get the real - and intended - impact.

I can say this confidently because I have been to the Parthenon. While I understand where the Elgin marbles 'fit' into the whole, it would have been far better to see them at the same time as I saw the rest of the building, even if they were not attached. At least then I have the best context possible for viewing this masterpiece of human architecture and art.

I do not think this would lead to a slippery slope requiring the return of all antiquities to their country of origin. It's not a matter of a single statue or a painting; this is a piece of art that has been broken apart and spread across the globe (for whatever reason). Reuniting the pieces makes this a fairly unique case.

For the Elgin Marbles and - by extension - any piece of the Parthenon, whether the piece belongs to Greece, Britain, or all humanity isn't the relevant issue. Nor is it relevant to discuss how long some part of the Parthenon has been somewhere in determining whether it should go back. The important question to ask is: Do we or do we not want to preserve great pieces of art? If the answer is yes, then the British acted to save an important part of this major site, and they should now complete this act by helping to reunite the pieces of the Parthenon as best as they are able. The Parthenon is a unique object, an architectural artwork, and keeping it scattered across the world - for any reason - is not in the best interests of anyone who cares about art or history.