http://www.dailygusto.com/ Looking around. Trying to figure it out. en-us 2010-02-16T17:24:30-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2010/02/paul-klee-stay-at-ho.php I began reading "Klee," a biography of the Swiss artist by G. Di San Lazzaro. It was written in Italian in 1957, and at first I enjoyed its eccentricities, or what seemed clearly like writing from another time and place. Just on the first page, Lazzaro talks about Klee's feeling the "lure of the Mediterranean" and the artist's "penetrating eyes are characteristically African." There's something liberating about being able to say whatever you want, even if it doesn't hold up. I was hoping the book would lead to unexpected insights about Klee's work. It didn't. I couldn't even finish it because the writing relied too much on stereotypes and romance. 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... Art harry 2010-02-16T17:24:30-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2010/02/sol-lewitts-advice-t.php Just came across this letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse. It seems like great advice in favor of losing preconceptions and hangups. (I wish I could credit who passed it on to me, but it was through Facebook, which has become too unmanageable and unwieldy. I click a link and read it hours later and then lose all hopes of tracing the source. C'est l'internet). Here's the beginning: 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... Art harry 2010-02-16T14:36:38-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2010/01/subtitle-stop-the-ga.php Sebastian Smee writes an excellent call for the trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to think again before the continue with their plans for an ultra-modern expansion by Renzo Piano. (This article struck me like a thunderbolt. Too bad the title of it doesn't match Smee's impassioned plea. My subtitle would be better.) 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... Art harry 2010-01-22T04:11:28-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/11/watteaus-world.php 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... Art harry 2009-11-10T17:07:10-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/11/davenports-balthus.php I just finished reading Guy Davenport's A Balthus Notebook. Lots of instigation in this book, and I thought I'd share one bit, if only because it speaks to my newfound love of cave painting: 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.... Art harry 2009-11-04T09:36:25-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/11/clapping-music.php Thanks to Matt, I'm rediscovering the music of Steve Reich. I liked his pieces from the 1970s and '80s, and then somewhere around "The Cave," I stopped listening. I found the classic piece from 1972 "Clapping Music" in its many permutations on YouTube. So much of Reich's music from this time is about phasing, the musical technique of repeating the same pattern in different tempos. To me, you can get a similar effect by playing Reich's music at slightly different times. You can phase his phasing in and out. 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.... Music harry 2009-11-02T11:56:32-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/autumn.php 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... Art harry 2009-10-27T09:21:05-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/guston.php I just finished Ross Feld's wonderful book "Guston in Time." Feld belongs to that line of poets like Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara that were deeply involved in visual art. He brings an incredible eye and descriptive power to Philip Guston's work and also a great asset: he was one of Guston's closest friends in the later years. 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... Art harry 2009-10-22T21:18:56-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/cave-paintings.php While in the library a couple weeks ago, I came across Gregory Curtis's book "The Cave Painters." It's a slim volume that is an excellent introduction to the art produced in the caves of western Europe from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. By the time I finished it, my mind was awash in ideas about my own painting and what it means to put paint to a surface. The strangest thing about the study of cave painting is that it's almost a forensic science. Anthropologists gather evidence, chart history, where things appear and how often. But there's an elephant in the room: why? 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... Abstraction harry 2009-10-20T10:06:49-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/carl-plansky-honest.php 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... Art harry 2009-10-18T20:47:36-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/mondrian-boogie-woog.php 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... Abstraction harry 2009-10-18T06:38:31-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/paintings-from-early.php I'm slowly making my way with acrylics. It was hard to give up oils, which I know I'll go back to, but having my studio in my apartment means not being able to use all the lovely toxic chemicals that I feel the need to use with oils. So I'm diving into the world of plastics. 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... Art harry 2009-10-17T08:57:11-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/irving-penn-1917-200.php I've always loved Irving Penn's still life photos the best. Gnarled cigarettes in velvety silver have as much character as a his famous image of Picasso's face; frozen food looks geometric like the third stage of cubism (after analytic and synthetic comes organic, of course). NY Times obit here. Irving Penn, Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, France, 1957 Irving Penn, Cigarette 17, New York, 1972 Irving Penn, Frozen Foods, New York, 1977... Photography harry 2009-10-08T05:40:46-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/virginia-martinsen-b.php I published a piece on these two artists over the Examiner. I've been in the studio a lot lately, working with acrylic paint in a serious, sustained way. I've always avoided it because the colors don't come naturally to me. I can be blown away by other people's acrylic color, but mine always has seemed artificial and harsh. Somehow I've gotten over that hump (and will post pics soon). In any case, I've been thinking a lot about how artists' approach liquidity.... Art harry 2009-10-07T09:20:57-05:00 http://www.dailygusto.com/blog/archives/2009/10/words.php 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... Art harry 2009-10-01T09:09:15-05:00