3/100 Household Objects

Water Glass with Polka Dots, acrylic on board, 6" x 6", 2011

2/100 Household Objects

Pincushion and Spool, acrylic on board, 6" x 6", 2011

100 Household Objects

Clear Lightbulb, acrylic on panel, 4" x 6", 2011

I’ve started a new project, which is going to take me a couple of years, at least. I’m going to paint 100 household objects.

This is the first one in the series.

Dave is always telling me to write shorter posts, more often. So that’s all for now. More household objects to come.

 

So True

 Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

— Stephen Destaebler, from Art & Fear

 

Don’t wait for inspiration — it comes while one is working.

— Matisse

 

 

 

Over time

After getting so excited about Dave’s portrait last month, I have been persuading friends to model for me. It turns out that writers are good subjects, because they not only have flexible schedules, but can keep themselves occupied by thinking deep thoughts while they are sitting and giving me their faces.

Zach went first, and was a lovely subject. I was surprised to find myself, in the first few moments of beginning the painting, deeply shy of looking so directly and hungrily at the face of someone I didn’t know very well. It’s both an intimate and demanding thing, this gaze. You never look that intensely at someone’s face in ordinary life; there is no social equivalent.

Here’s the first state:

And here is the finished (mostly? I still feel like poking at it a bit with a brush, but judiciously) version:

What with my newfound interest in painting people’s faces, I finally watched the Alice Neel documentary. I’ve never truly loved her paintings, but I deeply admire her energy and commitment to keep working, all those years in obscurity. And I carefully transcribed this Robert Storr quote from the film, because I think it is the perfect philosophical/metaphysical explanation to anyone who asks what the difference is between painting from life and painting from photographs:

The business about the difference between painting and photography becomes crucial in the sense that the photograph does capture somebody in a manner which freezes that person in an instant. Painting never freezes in quite that way, painting takes place over time. But the mere fact that painting is not a second arrested, but is a relationship of seeing and of the seer and the subject means that painting contains duration somehow. When you look at a painting you’re seeing an extended moment, you’re seeing time happen, not just time stopped, which gives the photograph a somewhat more obviously morbid characteristic and painting a less morbid one.

Yesterday, I started a new painting of our friend Jesse, or “Ole Pretty Eyes” as we like to call him:

He is threatening to get a haircut and shave, so we’ll see how different he looks at the next sitting.

And I also started a self-portrait a while back, that I want to pair with the portrait of Dave as a diptych, so that we’re looking at each other, a la Piero della Francesca’s portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza. But then I realized that while I can do the face from life (or a mirror, as the case may be) I will need to work from a photograph to get the eyes looking in the right direction (i.e. towards the painting of Dave, not out towards the viewer). So photographs do have their uses in painting, even from life.

Self Portrait, first state. Looking in the wrong direction, and also, a little scary.

Finally, I also recently re-read Dave Hickey’s essay, “This Mortal Magic,” from his classic book Air Guitar, in which he riffs on Storr’s notion of painting containing duration, and therefore being less morbid than photography.

It’s not so much what we do, or even what happens, it’s the way things overlap and intersect:  I was sitting at the desk in my office, in my apartment in las Vegas, reading John Shearman’s observations on the historical circumstances of Renaissance portraiture. Shearman had begun by positioning these portraits within the lives of their sitters, sketching in their lives before and after the paintings were made. Now he was suggesting, on this evidence, that the technical obsession with capturing the palpable vivacity of the sitter in Renaissance portraiture was very likely due to the fragility of life in that period, to the poverty of communications in Italy, and to the mobility of the class of people who had their portraits made—arguing that the portrait, where it hung, functioned less as a picture or a documents than as an icon of the sitter’s actual presence in the space from which she or he was absent due to death or duty. Thus the passionate vivacity of these pictures. The sitter was supposed to be there.

Reading about these short, perilous Renaissance lives on a quiet, desert morning in the late twentieth century must have sharpened by awareness of time whooshing by, because I suddenly remembered that I had to make a telephone call. Closing Shearman’s book, I pulled over my Rolodex and flipped it open immediately, accidentally, to the late Scott Burton’s card. I wasn’t surprised to find it, since I stopped  clearing dead people out of my Rolodex years ago. Throwing those little cards away into the trash is a very depressing chore—and leaving them there, with their disconnected numbers intact and their abandoned addresses appended, is a way of remembering, of being reminded in the midst of life. On this occasion, seeing Scott’s name there, on the little white tombstone of his file card, in the midst of reading about mortality and Renaissance portraits, made me think of how nice it would be to go somewhere and see a full-blown, luminous sixteenth-century portrait of the artist in his glory.

I could have pulled an exhibition catalogue off the shelf and looked at a photograph, of course, but photographs are nailed in the moment of their making and when the subject is dead, this distance from the present only reminds you of that. I would have preferred an image that reminded me, persuasively, physically, that Scott had once been alive, that we had told some jokes, had some laughs—something that caught the little tremor that flickered around Scott’s upper lip, always threatening to burst into a smile or a sneer, you never knew which. That’s what painting used to do—what only painting can do—and does no longer, and this seemed a pity, since regardless of fashions in image-making, we continue to die at an alarming rate.

Veering

Philip Guston, "Pantheon"

I’ve been dipping in and out of the new book of Philip Guston’s collected writings, lectures and conversations, and I loved this exchange between Guston and Clark Coolidge (who edited the book).

PG:  Well, there’s something I think I’ll probably constantly keep vacillating or wavering between, movement or no movement. I think it’s true of my whole past, as far as I know my past, to be fascinated by the one and the multitudinous. Sometimes I’ll put a lot of forms into a picture and think:  Why do I need all that?  I really don’t need this multitudinous feeling of forms. The world is filled with multitudinous forms. I really am looking for one form, a static form, from which the multitudinous forms come anyway. Like that bulging book we’re looking at now. It’s a sculptured book and yet it’s done very simply, in a very minimal way. It’s one of the best books of the series. There’s just something about having a single form which is there in a space. There’s no movement to speak of visually. It’s just there, and yet it’s shaking, like throbbing, or burning or moving, but there’s no sign of its moving. Now that book, I may be reading my things into it that other people don’t see, but I don’t think so.

CC:  No, I see what you mean. It’s vibrating.

PG:  It vibrates! In other words, it’s like nailing down a butterfly but the damn thing is still moving around. And this seems to be the whole act of art anyway, to nail it down for a minute but not kill it. That’s what I mean. Whereas in the act of painting sometimes, when I don’t feel so all together, and I want to keep in motion, I’ll paint movement. I mean, I’ll just put down a lot of things. And finally that doesn’t satisfy me, and I always wonder why it doesn’t satisfy me. But it doesn’t sum it up for me. There’s no need for it. That is to say, instead of painting all those forms moving around in the pictures—what the hell, I could just as well pull up the shade and look out the window on the street. Why do I have to do it? I don’t have to do it on canvas, but I want to do what nature doesn’t do. I mean, I can look out and see trees blowing, wind moving, and things are happening. I don’t have to duplicate that. But what I don’t see is a single form that’s vibrating away, constantly, forever and ever and ever to keep vibrating. And that seems to be magical as hell, enigmatic as hell, really. Gee, I never said that before, that way. Now that book is really moving.

CC:  That goes back to my feeling that we’ve talked about before, that in art you always work between opposites. Between stopping and going, stasis and movement, abstraction and figuration.

PG:  Yes, that’s right.

CC:  I think it’s like a machine that keeps us going, like electricity.

PG:  It’s a tension between the two.

CC:  Between gaps, between poles. Which causes a lot of our dissatisfaction, because we go more to one side.

PG:  You mean, a necessary dissatisfaction.

CC:  Yeah, because at any one time it’s more one or the other.

PG:  Veering.

CC:  When we’re toward this, we think maybe that one’s wrong.

PG:  That’s right.

CC:  But we don’t realize that we’re constantly moving. You never really stop anything, unless you die. Wherever that is.

I love his description of the act of art as being like nailing down a live butterfly for a moment, without killing it. That really is the trick. Ninety percent of the time my butterflies die on the table.

Portrait of Dave

The other day I got Dave to sit for me. We spent about an hour and a half, and came out with this:

I was happy. Even unfinished it somehow captured how Dave looks to me. It was painted with acrylic paint and was really fun; I’ve been feeling more comfortable with acrylic paint recently. I’ve also been wondering (sacrilege!) if the color isn’t a little brighter and more vibrant than oil paint. I’m becoming a big fan of Golden’s line of OPEN acrylics. They stay wet and workable on your palette for hours and hours, but dry pretty fast on the painting, and if I want to speed up the drying time I just blast it with a blow dryer.

Yesterday we had a second session and I finished it. The whole thing took about 4 hours total, split between the two sittings. I want to do more portraits!

Dave, acrylic on panel, 6 3/4" x 8"

Painting is Talking With the Hands Made Permanent

Ken Kewley, "Certosa Still Life," acrylic on paper, 8" x 8", 2010

I recently found this meditation/musing on painting by Ken Kewley, an artist whose work I was not previously familiar with. It’s wonderful. It’s pretty  long, the kind of thing you can dip in and out of, pulling out little inspirational nuggets when you need a nudge in one direction or another, a jumpstart, a friendly hand, a reminder of something you know deep down but keep forgetting. It’s had me in a good mood all week long.

A few choice quotes:

Love colors as writers love words. It is the love that comes through when the mind gets out of the way. Don’t think too much. Trust your instincts. I try not to worry about what I do not know, what I have been unable to teach myself. My inabilities serve me better than my abilities. That art is not something that is learned and then practiced, it is a form of communication and one is always trying to say something clearer

. . .

You are emphasizing what interests you and minimizing other things by putting them in the service of your true passion and leaving out altogether what distracts. Keep it simple.

. . .

As far as keeping a painting fresh to the end, you cannot lose site of the reason for starting the painting in the first place. That first excitement, that one big relationship, if the details slowly obscure that relationship the painting becomes dull, then it is necessary to dig back in and pull it out even if it means upturning days of work. In the end nothing is lost and it will be more exciting for being harder found and deeper felt.

. . .

I tend to like paintings where the abstraction is strong. By this I mean that the paint, the colors and shapes, are distinct, like strong actors in a play. Going towards abstraction does not mean going away from representation. It is more like describing something real by other means than illustration. It is like describing an apple with your hands, forming the shape in the air with your hands, by enclosing an imaginary object with two hands. You do not try to make your hand look like an apple. Paint takes over the role of the hands and does not hide the fact that it is paint. Painting is talking with the hands made permanent.

. . .

Paintings are not finished, they are stopped.

. . .

Do not work too hard, but work all the time.

Ken Kewley, "Nude (After Ingres)," acrylic on paper, 6" x 4", 2006

Hiatus

It’s been a long time, unintentionally. Or rather, with the best of intentions — ‘write blog post’ written on my to-do list every week for, well, four months now.

Summer was lovely, but is sadly, I think, officially over now. It being October and all. And this glorious sunflower took a nose-dive shortly after this picture was taken and is currently lying face-down in the rain. Which has also, officially, started.

More later, though. And paintings.

Up and Down

I am almost finished with my Breughel inspired painting. I like it. What a strange feeling to not loathe something I’ve made after it is finished. I could get used to it.

All that remains is the final fixing and fussing, which I have to be in a particular mood (both meticulous and ruthless) to do.

The small studies I made of the legs, comparing red and black underpaintings, turned into a piece of their own. It worked out well, actually; the community college where I teach has a faculty show every summer, and as the gallery is quite small the work submitted must be modestly sized. I finished these just in time to put them in the show. As for the red versus black question . . . it didn’t make a huge amount of difference, but I’m glad I questioned my own orthodoxy. In the end, I found that the black underpainting made for more interesting layering, because you’re putting warm tones over a cool underpainting, instead of warm over warm, so I will probably switch to using a gray underpainting from now on.

 

I realized if I turned one of them upside down, they made kind of palindromic bookends. (The gray underpainting is on the left throughout.)

 

 

I wanted the space to be a bit more interesting, and to maybe give a sense of movement, if possible. So I repainted the background white with a fairly thick impasto that you can’t really see in the below photographs.

 

And I thought about stopping at this point. You know, I had spent all that time painstakingly rendering the legs, and there was something satisfying about them delineated against the crispness of the white background. But it just didn’t seem that interesting, ultimately. So what if I can render. Lots of painters can, but unless they have something to say with it, no one is going to care except for those who will be impressed that it looks “like a photograph.” So then I went all smeary on them, and for a day was depressed that I had ruined them.

 

And then I broke out the orbital sander, and was happy again. Finished!

 

“Up and Down,” oil on canvas over panel, 9″ x 12″ and 9.5″ x 12″, 2011

Luckily for me, the opposing tug between slaving away over something to make it “perfect” and the corresponding, atavistic urge to destroy that same object of my affections worked out nicely this time. It doesn’t always. I both want to be in control, and want something outside my control to swoop in and do something surprising and hopefully awesome to my paintings, without destroying the parts I like. Ha ha. I suppose that’s what a lot of us would like for our lives, as well.

Dave helped me figure out a title for this diptych. I don’t want to always cop out and have everything be “Untitled,” but it’s so hard to walk the line between overly descriptive/proscriptive titles that leave nothing to the imagination, and overly obscure vague ones that don’t give your viewer anything to go on. I had been mulling over “Flying/Falling,” but we decided that titles with slashes in them were pretty much always pretentious and terrible. I re-perused my inspiration, the Auden poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” to see if there were any snatches of it I could use, but there weren’t, really. So when Dave proffered “Up and Down,” it seemed like a good fit, and I took it.