I'm reading Jed Perl's "Antoine's Alphabet," a book about the French painter Antoine Watteau. Perl makes an alphabetical attempt at putting Watteau at the center of modern Western painting. Every letter of the alphabet has entries that range from informative to descriptive to tangential. Under "F," for example, Perl writes about Fans, Flaubert, Flirtation, Fragments, and Friendship. Some of the entries are just anecdotes from Perl's life that have to do with Watteau's themes; others are stories about people indebted to Watteau or concerned about his influence. And what is Watteau all about? This paragraph struck me as an enticement:
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.
I finally finished the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail (OCA). This trail follows the path of the old water delivery service between the Croton Aqueduct and New York City. The aqueduct went 29 miles from bucolic natural land, through the suburbs of Westchester County, and ended in the city. The aqueduct is no longer used, but the land it was on has been wisely converted into a long trail that serves as an escape from the hectic congestion of New York. Beginning in the Bronx and going in a fairly straight shot, one can feel many miles away from hte world of concrete, taxis and construction.
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.
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.
Former Artforum editor Joseph Masheck and MoMA's John Elderfield have a good conversation about Piet Mondrian and his retrospective in 1996 in the video from Charlie Rose below. It's clear Rose doesn't know much about Mondrian, but his combative and aggressive questioning eventually gets at something interesting.
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)
After disappearing into the abyss of Independent Film Week for a documentary about a gold-mining town in Colombia that I'm working on, I'm finally back in groove of making art, thinking about art, and writing about art. Yesterday I posted my latest piece for the Examiner: an interview with Matt Held, who has received notoriety for having the idea to paint portraits of people based on their Facebook profile photo. Since much of the art world is about ideas but fails to find a suitable visual form, I was skeptical about seeing Matt's show at Denise Bibro. But after seeing the paintings, I was a true believer. The man can paint, and the work looks fantastic.
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 was a newspaper reporter as well as a novelist. Because of my time as a journalist, I developed habits of observing and letting facts speak for themselves. Capturing the subject is the most important thing, and your opinions as a journalist are secondary. Above all, this takes great empathy.
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).
Over at the LA Times, art critic Christopher Knight has fired a salvo in favor of academic sanity in the war over an archive that may have been Frida Kahlo's.
A collection of some 1,200 items, which contains everything from small paintings to recipes, is hotly contested. Knight sums up the controversy in a blog post:
More than a dozen prominent people have claimed the archive is a fake, even though none of them has seen it.
Frida Kahlo 007a Like I said, bizarre. The archive's owners, Leticia Fernandez and Carlos Noyola, haven't even made a definitive claim that the 1,200-piece archive did in fact belong to Kahlo -- although their initial research certainly leads them in that direction. That's why they acquired it in 2004.
Several notable artists who lived and worked with Kahlo and her husband, famed muralist Diego Rivera, have examined it. Arturo Bustos, Arturo Estrada and Rina Lazo are convinced of its authenticity, and they have attested as much.
The question for Knight, and the art world generally, is why a knee-jerk barricading of authenticity happens whenever new material comes to light. The choice isn't between immediately accepting or not accepting. The imperative is to investigate and do what artists and scholars should do: look.
I was really surprised by the survey of Jack Tworkov's work at UBS Gallery and I just had to write about it. Tworkov is almost more like a European artist than an American one. His focus is on intellectual engagement as much as egoistic triumph. It's rare for painters here to write and think about art as eloquently as they create it, but Tworkov certainly shines as an exception that proves the rule. This show is a must-see.
Catherine Kehoe has surveyed contemporary painters about what colors are in their palettes, as well as how they're arranged and what brushes and mediums are used. Ever wonder what colors Paul Cezanne used? How about Christopher Chippendale, Susanna Coffey, Lois Dodd, John Dubrow, Emily Eveleth, Janet Fish, Alex Kanevsky, Catherine Kehoe, David Kelley, Ken Kewley, Dik F. Liu, Nancy McCarthy, George Nick, Richard Raiselis, and Hal Reddicliffe?
There's a lot of provocative information here. Who knew so many people loved Winsor Newton?
Louise Fishman uses thick brushes to set down bold abstract marks on big canvases. Her work strikes me as modest but adventurous, like someone who sets out walking from their home and winds up at Tierra del Fuego. She accumulates honest, limited brushstrokes in a way that's deliberative but fierce. Her titles are emotional: "Fugitive," "Swarm of Dreams," "A Certain Marvelous Thing."
Her current show at Cheim and Read is a must-see. She uses a lot of strong vertical and horizontal marks, usually modest in length and ambition, but with incredibly bold, clear colors that seem to vibrate and create a deep space.
This canvas is like an impenetrable thicket of blues and blacks, forming a kind of basket to project your thoughts and feelings. These photos don't do the work any kind of justice. Sorry Louise -- but these should inspire you to head to C&R.
I have a bad habit of defending the indefensible. So let's get this out of the way: Lisa Yuskavage doesn't need defending, especially from me, for the following reasons.
I don't especially like her work
For better or worse, her place in the history of painting over the past 15 years is pretty solid
She will continue to collect incredible sums of money for her painting
But in a recent article by Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic calls her work dated and welcomes a new guard into the current mess of the art world. Reviewing her last show, Saltz says it feels "stuck in another time."
Other critics, like David Cohen, focus on the abstract, painterly qualities in Yuskavage's latest work. I think Saltz gets it absolutely right when he catalogs her influences and what the work looks like.
Yuskavage's beanpoles, voluptuaries, and ugly ducklings make it clear that her work is less connected to classical art than to calendar illustration, cheesecake, dirty playing cards, Vargas, and Thomas Kinkade. These aren't meant as insults. Yuskavage's influences also include Hallmark greeting cards, Russ Meyer, the Hudson River School, Maxfield Parrish, seventies Penthouse, Impressionism, third-string Italian masters, and the kind of naturalist kitsch the Nazis liked. This mix is kinkier and more interesting than any discourse about technique and critique.
All these critics seem to miss something. There is a mysterious x factor behind the most interesting paintings because they come by necessity.
Yuskavage always looks like she's on top of her game. Looking at her paintings, one thinks she can technically do anything she wants, which makes her work seem more like a decision than a necessity.
So, seeing work so connected to cheesecake, it seems like a marketing gag. Her work seems like a goof on prurient interest. She's a good painter choosing to work with inflammatory, attention-grabbing images.
That might be the case, I don't know. But I was convinced upon hearing her speak (read my report here) that there's something else happening in these images.
Yuskavage recalled a deep crisis in her painting when, after graduating from Yale, she just couldn't paint. She looked at her work, which showed a deft handling of paint, lights and darks, color, etc., and thought that is sucked. She had no connection to what she was painting, and stopped working for about a year.
Then the bouncy breasts came in.
Yuskavage started painting these ridiculous icons of the uber-feminine. They were cartoons, really, but she felt like she had to paint them.
"I need to do these paintings to breathe," she said, "I know what it's like to make paintings I hated and I almost died."
This is something critics will not understand, but it's something artists know too well. You get to a point where you're deeply involved in a particular imagery and it won't let you go. Is it deep? Is it shallow? It doesn't matter. You have to do it.
That's the most frightening, courageous and stupid thing of all: that your work could mean nothing, and you still have to do it. Because it's yours, but it's also not yours. Something beyond your control compels you.
Abstract painters have it easy in this respect: their imagery is more difficult to pin down. What happens when the deepest recesses of your imagination holds cheesy characters out of '70s Penthouse magazines? Yuskavage takes us there.
One can talk about the meaning of her paintings. They've certainly generated a lot of discussion about the male gaze, feminine experience, etc. But above all, the meanings must be personal. I could talk about how Yuskavage, a middle-aged woman who I believe doesn't have kids, painted a lot of elusive children in her latest show (one was playing in a graveyard). That's personal, but obvious and programmatic. Subject matter and imagery might be our connection to things outside of ourselves, but there's something happening even deeper than that.
None of this is to say she's making great paintings. But I feel the need to point out there's a difference in critical and artistic necessity. The critics will always observe and try to shape historical movements and classifications. The best artists are up to something else, and the best thing I can say about Yuskavage is that she's more of an artist than a critic, no matter her marketing acumen.
Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Peter Saul's world. He's an artist drawn to the shocking and outrageous. He twirls everyday forms around his finger like a wedding ring; he's married to the wild explosion of surplus and junk in American life.
A stellar show of his early work is on view at George Adams Gallery in Chelsea (through April 11). Saul's later work becomes more dayglo and provocative as it gets more character-based.
In the early drawings, though, we see Saul beginning to grapple with comic books and highways and refrigerators while the art world was still in its abstract-expressionist hangover. Everyday objects tend towards the abstract and become occasions for whimsy and endless whirl.
In some ways these drawings remind me of Antonioni's great finale to Zabriskie Point, where a brand new suburban home explodes in the American desert, sending all manner of consumer goods tumbling through the air to a Pink Floyd soundtrack (go to 3:30 in the video below for the explosions. Trust me: it's worth it).
But where Antonioni is making a movie about the catastrophe of modern relationships that are intertwined with suburbia and consumerism, Saul is taking a bumpercar ride through their birth.
Painter Pat Lipsky gave a talk last night at the NY Studio School on "The Right Color."
Ms. Lipsky, whose work is mostly abstract and geometrical, gave a cool and elegant defense of painting as the formal practice of creating beauty. She quoted Mark Rothko, saying, "An expression of beauty is an expression of rightness."
"There has been a devaluation of beauty," Lipsky said, referring to a review by art critic Robert Hughes where he asked if creating beautiful objects is enough to make good art.
She recalled creating her early color field paintings in 1969, which were made by applying acrylic paint to wet canvas with sponges.
These were "one shot" paintings that she would do in one sitting in order to capture a particular spirit (and they were very big, some as long as ten feet or so).
If she made one of these paintings and it didn't work, she threw it away.
"There was nothing else to do with them," Lipsy said. "Either you hit it or you blew it."
A painter to the core, Lipsky gets excited at the technical details. She enthusiastically recalled creating over 100 different tones for her painting "Episcopalian Pandemonium," which is based on a watercolor she did. When she talked about switching from acrylic paint to oil, it felt like a moral choice.
Because she is so connected to materials, she has no time for conceptual art.
Talking about Marcel Duchamp putting a shovel on display as a piece of sculpture, Ms. Lipsky said the shovel is, to her mind, "the perfect instrument to handle his work."
Lipsky, looking elegant in a black suit, quoted Proust at one point during her talk. "I never saw the same sea twice," the French author said.
For Lipsky, we never see the same color twice. One color put beside others changes the value. Like the sea, color is very specific -- but very vast, too.
Terry Winters' "Knotted Graphs" at Matthew Marks closes tomorrow. Winters creates a conceptual space with layered transparent paints based on scientific ideas of knot theory.
This has been in my "write about" list for almost two months now because there's something profound in the way Winters combines personal brushwork and line with seemingly impersonal patterns and scientific illustration ideas. I think a bit of Matthew Ritchie, who also has this fascination with how scientific ideas can be made fleshy. I ran out of time to write about it, but this show is worth taking the time to see.
Here's your last chance to see a room full of great jazzy abstractions from Bay Area artist Elmer Bischoff at George Adams gallery. The show closes tomorrow. Though I love his later representional stuff even more, this work from the late '40s and early '50s shines with his rhythm and evocative West Coast color sense.
Joanne Mattera has some great pics from the Red Dot Fair in Miami. I was struck by Jorge Fick's work, which is all about color and shapes forming a simple but dynamic space. I love how he uses tone and his figures get a lot of movement. The picture above, called "Two Potatoes," is appropriate for both Christmas and, obviously, St. Patrick's Day. Humor is undervalued in abstract art.
Given the infinite number of possible subjects in the world, it's hard to believe any painter has ever been strapped for an idea of what to paint. But it happens. It's happened to me. Last night, painter Wolf Kahn gave a talk on "Finding Subject Matter," along with a four-point program to get through the problem.
Kahn is a total pro. With his shock of white hair and a grandpa sweater, he speaks with the ease and assurance of an artist who knows who he is and who has done this kind of talk over and over again. He is a funny storyteller and an engaging personality.
He began his talk by apologizing for repeating anecdotes, but that certain stories are the best illustrations of certain point. He said he tries to keep people from taking his workshops more than once because the facade of clever spontaneity crumbles once you've heard the same story a few times.
His four ideas for finding a subject matter were:
1. Explore the visual field. Look around you, and try to paint the things you don't know the name to (his examples were the space between a figure's ear and shoulder, and the space between the lowest branch on a tree and the ground). "There's nothing more useful in art than what you don't know," Kahn said.
