But early in the book, I learned a little something that made me feel even more of a kinship for Klee. He was a stay-at-home dad and would watch his son while his wife brought home the bacon. (Jennifer has always wanted a t-shirt that says "Mom brings home the bacon. Dad brings home the Francis Bacon.")

Here's an interesting passage:

"In the little flat in Munich," so the artist's son, Felix Klee tells us, "my mother practised her profession every day. She gave music lessons from morning to night and her husband, still the unknown artists, had to see to the chores and look after the baby. The little kitchen was his room; there his pictures and drawings saw the light, there glass was etched, photographs developed, nappies washed and sockes mended . . .

In that same kitchen he made me wonderful toys with great skill--toy trains, a cardboard railway station and a puppet theatre. The heads were clay, the costumes cut and sewn by himself, the scenery pasted and painted. A careful record was kept of the family's income and expenditure, new pictures catalogues, a diary kept in which everything was entered down to my temperature and my progress in learning to speak . . .

In the afternoons, my fathertook me to the outskirts of the town--he, furnished with a folding chair, an easel, a box of colours and a bottle of water; I, with some of my toys. For the summer holidays the whole family left for Berne to stay with my grandparents, or for Beatenberg where a great-aunt kept a hotel."

Perhaps the boy who wanted to be a little girl and wear frilled knickers was being punished by fate. In the Klee's small flat the roles of man and woman were reversed.

Felix Klee's account is so charming and sounds incredibly bucolic. That Lazzaro would even think of this life as punishment is one reason I couldn't finish the book. It's not just from a different time and a different country. It's from a different universe.

Dear Eva,

It will be almost a month since you wrote to me and you have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it. Don't! Learn to say "Fuck You" to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itchin, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!

You can read the whole thing here.

Just as it did in her day, Gardner's palace museum still invites us to turn our back on the driving rationalism of modern life: on standardization, on uniform lighting, on the rush to embrace the new. We are invited to enter through an exterior that is deliberately reserved and opaque, whereupon we find ourselves in the most extraordinary sanctuary - a place of mystery and medievalism, of marvels and eccentricities: a jumble of anachronisms that bizarrely combines aspects of a Venetian palazzo, an enclosed medieval garden, and a monastic cloister.

That is about to change.

I love the old museums that do not look like cafeterias. My favorites have been the Gardner, the Morgan Library, and the Barnes. Are you seeing a pattern? All three of these museums have felt the need to accommodate the rush of visitors and all three have turned to architectural schemes that destroyed the special character that made them, well, special. Two of them are even using the same architect (Piano, who is actually great when he's not making high-end malls for the viewing of art).

I'm hoping the Gardner caretakers can find a different solution.

The human mind is artless, elegant, clumsy, penetrating, chaotic, obscure, a hopeless mix of serenity and hysteria, the lofty and the low-down, clarity and murk, and Watteau pulls his drawings and paintings straight out of this messy material, these moment-to-moment shifts in perception, apprehension, and feeling. His paintings suggest a mind that is, like all our minds, at once self-indulgent, unreliable, relentless, lucid, obtuse, unruly. And like the rest of us he allow his thoughts to drift, his moods to shit, his focus to go out of focus. We've all woken up in the morning feeling blue and then, an hour later, unaccountably, felt cheerful. Or vice versa. We know what it means to be confounded by our own emotions. Watteau's working methods, so far as we can see, mingled long periods of meditation and periods of frantic labor. He was willing to fuss over small things and do big things quickly, and by utilizing this erratic approach, he somehow managed to transcribe the vagaries of the human mind onto canvas, giving the painting a psychological texture like nothing else in the history of art. We accept Watteau's opacitites and obscurities becase we know what it is like to find ourselves, in the midst of even the simplest task, thinking about something entirely different.

Centuries before Plato beauty was a kind of good, and the appreciation of it a pleasure. Beauty has also traditionally been an outward sign of the soul's beauty. Balthus integrates this ancient tradition with Darwinian naturalism (beauty as sexual attraction). Darwin suspected that there was always "something left over" after sexual attractiveness has done its work, and that this something was what we call beauty, and that it may have given rise to art. The grace of line in a Lascaux horse is not the horse, but something that has been abstracted from it.

So here are six embedded videos to phase in and out as you please. You can press stop and play and do the same thing Steve Reich used to spend hours doing when he was cutting tape.

Before Iris was born, I walked about 20 miles of the trail. Since then, I haven't had the opportunity to finish the OCA. Last week, however, Iris was in daycare and there was a clear sky and moderate temperatures. I pounced on the opportunity to walk in the woods.

Getting off the commuter train at Scarborough, I picked up the trail and immediately realized I had chosen the best time possible to walk the OCA. The woods were ablaze; leaves were falling and in full fall splendor. I reached for my camera right away, but to my chagrin realized I'd forgotten it. So I decided to make some sketches in the little sketchbook I always carry with me. Every so often, I'd stop and do a quick scratchy sketch of something that caught my eye. But these weren't enough. There was something of my experience of the trail that was missing: COLOR.

I began grabbing leaves from the ground and looking very closely at them. I was amazed at the variation, of course, but also how the variations spoke to a lot of my current artistic concerns.

Off symmetry: Autumn leaves can look like Rorschach tests. Green splots mirror each other on brown leaves, almost perfect mirrors - but not quite. There are slight variations on the symmetry that makes the leaves more dynamic and alive, in process. There is a classical beauty to symmetry, and the variations make them seem more in motion.

Soft and hard: When I would bend down to pick up a particularly interesting leaf, I frequently wouldn't know if I was going to feel something brittle or soft. Leaves on the ground are dying and turning crunchy, but frequently they were soft and wilted. Usually the darkest browns, reds and purples would feel dry and the lightest greens and yellows would be moist. But it's not always the case. Feeling a yellow leaf with dark brown edges is always surprising and intimate. One gets to know where the leaf is in its life.

Two colors: Like an exercise by Joseph Albers, leaves can "fool" your eyes. I picked up an ocher leaf and thought it had blue spots. I looked closely and found the spots to be a different color when isolated, a more neutral green. But these two colors together effect each other in our mind in ways that aren't true. No color lives in isolation.

Edges: My paintings are always exercises in how edges are formed. Do colors bleed into one another, forming a soft boundary, or do they sit next to each other with hard boundaries? This is an untrue question. Look at an impressionist painting and you know why. Those pointillist canvases of little flecks of color are thousands of "hard" color decisions that add up to a soft effect. The idea of an edge truly depends on perspective, and I was surprised at how the microscopic colors of leaves reinforce this idea. Look at the spine of a leaf and you might be surprised to find how the leaf's colors reinforce the hard edges. For instance, a dark brown spine might look dark only because there's a soft border of yellow that bleeds into an equally dark brown on the leaf.

Complements: Thank you, thank you! No, really. Please, I don't deserve all this adulation. Stop. Who told Mother Nature that green and red are complements? And yellow and purple? Is it coincidence that color theory, which says complements make each other more intense, complements the color of leaves when they're at their most brilliant?

Line: Leaves can have such an astounding color rhythm. But it probably shouldn't have surprised me how much of the color is determined by the structure. One can look at a leaf like a painting and see the Renaissance war between desegno and colore. It all comes back to Venice and Florence! The Italian masters were forever debating what makes a painting special -- the way it's designed and laid out or its use of color? Thankfully, leaves provide a very clear answer: these ideas are inseparable. The most beautifully colored leaves come from a relationship with the way the veins unfold.

I could go on, but writing all of this makes me want to paint. Below is a painting I did after coming back from the trail, and the quick sketches I made in lieu of a picture machine. It's good to get out of the city once in a while.

This book lays open the minds of two artists struggling to get at something in their work and arguing over what it means to create. The book is quite short, and much of it consists of letters between Guston and Feld. Guston had given up abstract painting and was considered a traitor by many in the art world. He said he could no longer spend his life just measuring whether a dab of red would suffice on the picture plane. Abstraction and "pure" picture-making held no more allure for him. He had to paint recognizable forms and figures.

Guston tells Feld about teaching at Boston University and watching a student trying to paint a mural with a clock in it. The student fussed over how to paint the clock, working a long time and re-working it over and over. In the end, says Guston, he went over to the mural and grabbed the student's brush. "You want a clock? Here's a clock!" he said, and painted in a crude clock.

I was quite taken by the following paragraph written by Guston. The underlining is all by the artist. At issue is why paint one thing over another. Why fuss over how to paint a particular form? Why paint at all? Guston says this:

Ross--what is creating--this forming anyway?!! A treadmill? Try to stay on it--throw off the dross--make the architecture and content impossible to take apart--not even 1/8 of an inch padded. Lean. Yet, working with images as I am attempting, makes all so unmanageable, chaotic, as well as baffling. And so unpredictable, which is why that 1/8 of an inch change of forms & spaces, transforms the meaning. I know I'm going in circles talking to you this way. (Musa [Guston's wife], in the next room, just said "Did I hear a big sigh?")

Well--perhaps one should remain satisfied just to stay on the treadmill--to remain on it--maybe that is all that is truly given to us. My God! A lifetime spent--to have a few innocent moments. To baffle oneself--to come in the studio next day and feel--"I did that?" Is this me--To catch oneself off-guard?

"You want a clock? Here's a clock!" Oh, if it were only as direct and simple as that!

Why did people go to the caves to produce art? No one knows. And there is a stigma on the people who seriously study cave painting to actually create coherent theories as to why. The dominant thinking now is that we'll never understand why these paintings were created. I sympathize with this point of view. There's just not a lot of evidence. My regret is that I can't listen in to the lunchtime conversations of the people who study this stuff. There have to be interesting and provocative ideas out there that will never be published, just talked about.

The most fascinating thing to me is the evidence around how sophisticated the cave painters were. When you think about someone 30,000 years ago painting an animal the size of a Jackson Pollock painting 15 feet off the ground, it gets bewildering. They had to build scaffolding. There are still rope impressions from where the painters would jam would into rock crevasses. They had to pull in pigment. They had to create brushes. They had no light, and so needed illumination. And how did they learn to draw like that? A lot of recent research has proven the most impressive compositions weren't haphazard. They were planned and painted in to create the stunning overall effect we still get today. It's not an accident that we feel things upon seeing these paintings.

Towards the end of the book, after he narrates his visits to several caves, Curtis explains why anthropologists still copy art from the caves, even though photographic technology has never been better. It made me think of all my art classes where I had to copy work from other artists and all my surprise discoveries whenever I did it:

The art needs to be copied as well [as be inventoried]. Making copies is a long, often tedious process. In that way it is very much like an archaeological dig. And, like a dig, it is absolutely essential because, strange as it sounds, it is impossible to see the art merely by looking at the wall. The intense concentration copying requires reveals signs and images that were invisible before. Michel Lorblanchet, a distinguished prehistorian with considerable artistic talent, made copies in a cave named Pergouset. He had visited the cave more than twenty times, often with colleagues, and thought he knew it well. But when he began to make his copies, he discovered numerous animals and signs that hadn't been seen before, including a vulva some eighteen inches across that, once seen, becomes the first thing anyone notices on the wall. Lorblanchet worked in the cave for three years making copies. His copies show twelve horses, three reindeer, three mountain goats, one stag, a bison, an auroch, four undetermined animals, sixteen signs, the vulva mentioned above, and twelve undetermined traces. Years earlier, when Leroi-Gourhan visited the cave, he saw only an isolated mountain goat, a horse, and a bison. What Lorblanchet was able to see compared to what Leroi-Gourhan saw is the difference between copying and merely looking.

Below are a couple renderings by Henri Breuil, a new hero of mine. While he was working, the dominant theory about dating work from the caves was that there was a linear progression of art history. According to anthropologists at the time, so-called "primitive" work had to be done before more sophisticated work, since human beings get more and more cultured over time. Breuil, a religious man who took on the dominant Marxist-atheist anthropologist at the time, thought that life doesn't progress so cleanly. That certain people would choose a cruder, more raw style of painting. Over time, Breuil was vindicated and proven correct.

I've included just these images because I was charmed by them.

Today was a memorial service for painter and teacher Carl Plansky. I was enlisted to speak as one of his students. I have so many fond memories of Carl and felt honored to be asked, even though I felt inadequate to the task. He was a big presence in my time at the Studio School last year, and his influence will always be felt in my painting. He's just one of those strong voices on my shoulder. The best part of the service was seeing the people from Carl's life and getting an even richer sense of the man. Sadly, I had to leave after the service because Iris was not being a happy baby.

For my birthday last January, Jennifer decided to buy me a few tubes of really nice oil paint that she knew I would never buy myself. She knew I love Williamsburg paint and that I felt a connection with Carl. Sneaking on the internet, she found Carl's e-mail address and e-mailed him about wanting to get me a nice gift of colors. She gave him a budget, and Carl generously gave a gift of much more paint than she asked for. He sent me a small box with the paint (see above), explained that he carefully chose colors based on my interest in glazing, and in big letters wrote the word "ENJOY!"

That word is the first thing I think of now when I think of Carl. He led a big life and was in love with the things around him. That word seems like good advice.

You can read the first piece I wrote after his death here, and what I read today at the service is below. I don't know if Carl would've basked in all my remembrance or thought it too indulgent. But he was a special man and a very influential teacher to me, and the more I write the more I remember. I guess it's a way for me not to let go too quickly.

I knew Carl during the last year as a student at the Studio School. I was humbled to be asked to speak since I didn't know Carl for as long or as well as many of you, but I did get to know him very well as a teacher and mentor.

Perhaps it's the mark of a good teacher that they make their students feel special. Carl certainly did that. I've asked other students in the past few days about their memories of Carl, and I think Georgia Marantos summed it up well: He made us all feel special, because he was always himself with us, and he was a special person.

He was funny. He was smart. He had a big heart. And sometimes he could be a big pain in the butt.

Carl would come into my studio and actually take a long time to look at my work. I mean really look at it. He would pace back and forth, looking at my latest paintings, and I would hold my breath because I never knew what he was going to say.

The first time I met him, I recognized his accent and we bonded over being from Baltimore. Things were going well. We were laughing and bonding. Then he pointed at my paintings and told me "You have a problem. A big problem. You don't know how to use color."

On that first day, it set a pattern for my encounters with Carl for the rest of the school year. Just as we were laughing or joking, he would swoop in and critique in my work.

I was crushed. This was fundamental. Here was a man whose name was synonymous with color telling me I don't know what I'm doing. What was I supposed to do?

Carl eased me down. He said not to worry and that he suspected I am a "secret colorist." A secret colorist! I felt honored. But I'm still not sure what this means, other than my palette contained covert, unseen colors that should have been using instead of the ones I actually used.

But I chose to feel good about it because Carl inspired a kind of good-natured faith. I felt like I had a hidden reservoir that was untapped. Carl got excited about something in my work, and that got me excited, too.

Rebounding from my color problem, I always asked him questions about color, trying to intellectualize it, and he knew more than anyone on that subject. But in the end, his advice was to "pick a theory, any theory, and go with it." It wasn't an intellectual subject for Carl, even though he knew everything about it. "Go with warm against cool," he said. Just do it. It's just a matter of commitment.

Later on in the school year, Carl saw some of my paintings and said, "These look great! It's like you've never had any academic training!" I laughed and paraphrased him, saying "Oh, it's like you have no idea what you're doing at all!" He laughed, too, but then got serious.

"No," he said, "it's like you've actually felt out the colors for yourself. You feel these colors, and it's not just academic. It's really working." From Carl, this was high praise. I'd brought life into my work. My decisions had come with experience and feeling. This was the morality of art that Carl passed on to students: life and art cannot be separate. Personal commitment and experience matter. As a student, hearing this from Carl was a breath of fresh air.

Carl Plansky took a moral stand about what it means to make art, and I think that was one reason he dismissed so much of the art world. He looked at the work in Chelsea and so much of it just didn't matter.

He always told me to "trust my mark." It wasn't some kind of hokey idea of self-confidence. It was a deep understanding he had about the limitations of art and the limitations of life and what made them both so important. Their highest values are the same: honesty, bravery, and passion. They matter.

Carl Plansky was honest, brave and passionate, and I can't say enough about how much I will miss the man. But I am lucky because his voice - direct, funny, thick, and wise - will always be with me in the studio.

And speaking of something interesting (and Joseph Masheck), I came across this quote by Thomas Nozkowski at artist Ashlynn Browning's site:

I think any artist reaches a point at which their motor skills have developed. Once their brain/hand coordination's gotten to a certain level, they finally know how to do their own paintings. And it's a terrible moment. A terrible, terrible thing. Before that, it's all adventure. I'm gonna crash and burn or I'm gonna make it happen. Suddenly, you can make it happen, and that's scary. It's really the worst position, I think, for an artist to be in, and you have to find a way around it. Years ago, Joe Masheck and I were talking about Renoir's Society of Irregularists, the fight against what Renoir called false perfection. He said something like, "I'm going to start painting with my left hand and mess it up on purpose." And fifteen, twenty years ago, Joe and I were saying, "This is really lame, what a rotten idea." Now I find myself getting older, and I think: Oh, my God, now I know why he was saying this. He was asking: How do you keep up the energy that you had when you were on a tightrope? How do you make a new tightrope for yourself?

Similarly, John Elderfield quotes Mondrian in the video: "I'm not interested in making paintings. I'm interested in finding things out."

(The Mondrian discussion in the video starts around 39:45)

The pieces below are all 9" x 12". A funny thing has happened where I've begun starting pieces with particular feelings, ideas and colors in mind. And then I put them down and the painting speaks to me about what it needs. Because my ideas and feelings are different, each piece calls for something different to be completed. I used to worry about cohesiveness. Now I just think that's silly. Who lives their life worrying whether one day will fit the next?

Dinosaur

For C.P.

Sally's Shadow

Two Monsters

The experience added to my continuing problem with the role of ideas, which are allied with words, to art, which is allied with the visual/spatial sense. It's an age-old dilemma of how much of our experience comes through language, and how much transcends it. On the one extreme would be postmodern structuralists like Derrida who say our experience is completely formed by language. On the other extreme would be anthropologists and biologists who say language is simply performing a biological function of soothing and communicating desire.

I write in order to understand, but also in order to make myself look harder. Sometimes the writing seems incidental at the end of it. What matters is the process of having to look at all the elements of art and figure out what compels me to keep looking. I'm reading Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and came across a nice passage that seems to get at what I'm struggling with:

People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.

Dreiser, who I was expecting to be a horrible writer, is actually quite good. His characters are made by circumstance, but have certain points of decision where they can change their lives. At one point in the book, a man who has stolen a great deal of money laments that the newspaper accounts of his robbery accuse him but do not understand him. A moment's decision isn't just a moment's decision, but the result of a long chain of circumstances and decisions.

All of this is to say that life is complicated. To judge based solely on ideas or words is to ignore the incredible human component that's been built up behind an idea. And when an idea works in the flesh -- as does Matt Held's show -- then the debate is done (for the moment).