Rockport afternoon

This afternoon Sean and I spent a few hours in Rockport, where a friend of mine was having an opening at the Rockport Art Association. Good show Eva!

After sampling some of the local fudge, we walked around town a bit. Sean remarked that Motif #1 was much smaller than he'd imagined. My reply was somthing along the lines of "the paintbrush always adds a few feet". I would have though that by this point Motif #1 would be a dead subject, and nobody would be interested in painting or buying it. Seems that's not the case; Eva assures me that she sells as many paintings of it as she can make.

I haven't been up to Rockport for a few years; there are more galleries than I remember. In fact, it seems like every other window on Main St. has paintings hanging in it. It's almost like Disney Art-world. It wouldn't be like that if there wasn't money involved, but I have to wonder if that's really sustainable. Rockport's a tiny village with nothing but fishing and tourism... are that many people buying art while on vacation?

Another movie

I've posted another painting movie/podcast. Available here: Takeout.wmv

Fresh Paint: 25 Watts

Newly Completed Work:

25 Watts
Oil on Canvas on Panel
4" x 5"
October 1, 2005

and on, and on, and on...

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but lately probably even the majority of my art-related time is spent on activities other than painting.

For instance, today I'll have a good block of art-related time available. If I'm lucky, I'll have approximately 6 hours to devote to it. I expect I'll be able to get about 2 hours of painting done. I then have to finish up a mailing I'm trying to get out the door (1 hour), do some video editing for another of my painting movies (1.5 hours), take care of some emails (half an hour), and then plan some website enhancements (easily an hour). This is to say nothing about preparations for my upcoming show next week and the month-long online auction... It just doesn't stop.

Granted, a lot of things are coming together in the next few weeks that are making me pay attention to logistics more than I might, but I imagine this is a common enough situation. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that artists on average only spend 50% of their working time actually making art - the rest is spent on chores, essentially. Today at lunch I mentioned this to Chris Howard, and he said it's pretty much the same for writers.

I envy my studio neighbor who has an intern working for him this semester...

Fresh Paint: Battery

Newly Completed Work:

Battery
Oil on Canvas on Panel
5" x 4"
October 13, 2005

And another one...

I have a new video podcast available... Two and counting... I'm lovin this...

Check out the Feedburner site, or you can get it directly from my site.

Feedburner is still biased to audio Podcasts, since to access my video, you have to click the Listen button...

I'm a Vlogger now!

Welcome the wonderful world of video podcasting!

Take:
1 video cam.
1 blank canvas (well, panel, but the image isn't all that great, so who cares...).
14 tubes of paint.
1.5 hours in front of the easel.
6 hours editing video.
3 hours reading about RSS feeds (OK, I'm slow).

And VoiLa - my first video podcast.

I'm delighted, and now that I've figured it out, I can't wait to do more.

Fresh Paint: Can Opener

Newly Completed Work:

Can Opener
Oil on Panel
6" x 3"
October 14, 2005

Fresh Paint: Alladin's Lamp and a Marble

Newly Completed Work:

Alladin's Lamp and a Marble
Oil on Panel
4.5" x 7"
October 20, 2005
NFS

You can watch the creation of this painting as an online movie! Click Here

Caravaggio and the Art of Convention...

Today the Wall Street Journal carried a half page article discussing Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter with a full-color reproduction (I'm just thankful they didn't convert it to their Hedcut format). It isn't every day that you flip through the WSJ and see a) somebody being crucified (upside-down no less), and b) an icon of western art.

It's a great painting, I truly love it, and I will resist the temptation to start talking about it. The article itself was a mostly uninteresting paean to the power of art to inspire pity and compassion. What did intrigue me, though, was the author's remarks about Caravaggio's break with the traditional portrayal of this scene. Apparently, there was a fairly strict convention that always showed St. Peter after the cross had been lifted up in place, whereas this canvas shows the event unfolding; in the middle of the action. It caused a real stir, and it set me to thinking about the role of convention in today's art.

Everybody knows that modern art is all about subverting paradigms, breaking traditions, and shattering conventions. Yeah Yeah Yeah, It's all been done and novelty is an end in and of itself. The past has been wiped clean and there are no more standard iconographies to rebel against.

Right?

I'm not so sure. I wonder sometimes if many conventions aren't even subconscious until somebody really bold comes along and shakes things up... then everybody realizes "Hey, yeah, we've been painting St. Peter already on the cross all along... how about that!"

The art world is fractured, but even so we all work in one stream or another, even if they are seemingly unrelated; Abstract Expressionists over there, Realists over here, Surrealists down there... etc. BUT... you don't learn to paint like Jackson Pollack by looking exclusively at Lucian Freud, and vice versa. Each stream has it's own set of traditions, values, and most likely, well... conventions. If you want to be a good Abstract Expressionist you'd damned well better be steeped in Jackson Pollack... and you WILL absorb some of his style.

I'm not asking the question because I'm looking for molds to shatter; I'm not interested in innovation for novelty's sake... I think that's the ultimate expression of intellectual and artistic bankruptcy. And I certainly don't know the answer; I'm not clever enough by half. I guess I'm just asking the question... I know I'll be having a closer look from now on.

Scott Christensen

Loose, impressionistic western landscapes with a big bold flair are certaintly "a type". I'm not universally wowed by the genre, but this guy is a fantastic practitioner: http://www.christensenstudio.com/ His field sketches in particular are amazing... I think I like them better than many of the large studio paintings.

Browsing through the materials list for his seminars, I found a couple of noteworthy things. First, his palette is extremely limited -- white, 3 primaries, and 4 grays. Second, he was able to have the manufacturer pre-mix those grays for him... that's very cool.

The decision to use a limited or extended palette is interesting to me, and I'll write another post about it later. In short, though, with an extended palette (say, 30 colors or more), you have the opportunity to approach real-life colors with some fidelity -- nature is nothing if not a jumble of information. With a limited palette, you lose some of that verisimilitude, but you gain ease of use, control, and the ability to deliver an extremely powerful color harmony, almost automatically. I'd go so far as to say that his color harmony is a large part of what gives his paintings such elemental strength.

Another thing just occurred to me. Atmospheric perspective seems to force hue, value, and chroma into narrower bands. Objects in Scott's paintings are often far away -- that mountain range 10 miles off. Limited palettes can be used to great effect in portraying smaller families of hue/value/chroma. I wonder if he'd choose so few colors if he primarily focused on closer objects.

I have in the past used very limited palettes for still lifes, even, mostly for darker, Dutch-inspired stills. Lately, however, I've been interested in making more vividly colored still lifes, and therefore I use a much broader range of paints... upwards of 40. Both can be very convincing... more color is where I'm at now, though.

Maps as Art

Chris Howard has some cool maps he's been creating as part of his novel and short story projects. He mentioned to me that one of them was based on a watercolor sketch, which gives it a great antiquarian feel. I'd love to know more about the process. The aesthetic value of maps was not lost on Vermeer, who included them in a number of his paintings.

Learning To Paint

This weekend, we went to some close friends' home for a house-warming party. Our hostess is a phenomenal Indian chef. There are dozens if not hundreds of Indian restaurants in the Boston/Cambridge area, and I used to ask friends from India to recommend a good one. This would be met with something like an aggrieved sniff and a response along the lines of "We don't eat at those places; it's never as good as what we can make at home". If Sandhya is any indication of the norm, then I know this to be true.

In addition to being a wonderful chef, she is rediscovering a latent talent for painting, and has been quite busy at it lately -- she's doing a great job so far. When I wasn't busy eating, we had a conversation about learning to paint, and she brought out the book she's currently using. It's a fairly standard format -- essentially a step-by-step guide, walking the student through the construction of a painting, and as such it seems to be as good as any I've seen.

Now, learning from these instruction manuals is very good practice. I started this way, and I think it's extremely valuable to have the stages of a painting laid out before the student. It demystifies the process, and provides a roadmap to completion. Furthermore, I can't emphasize enough the importance of finishing paintings. Lots of them. It gives the beginner many new challenges and opportunities to grow technically, and it also builds confidence.

HOWEVER (and this is a big however)... I believe it's critical that the student leave these instruction manuals behind, as soon as possible. After their first steps with these books, the true education begins by looking at paintings by masters, and by closely observing nature.

Looking at masterpieces can take the "how-to" approach to the next level. How is that shadow constructed? Why are the clouds so convincing? Why is this light so life-like? More importantly, it gives the student the chance to be exposed to real artistic considerations, like composition, color harmonies, movement, line, etc. Even if we are not considering these at the level of thought-out analysis, I'm a great believer that we absorb A LOT subconsciously. When I was in grad school studying composition, I asked my advisor how to study... "Read as much music as possible, and simply notice and absorb everything you can". It turned out to be great advice, and I think it's every bit as applicable to painting. Who to look at? In a sense it doesn't matter... Find the art you love and look, look, look. Even if it isn't the greatest there is, you will certainly be learning, and you will eventually find your way to the really good stuff.

Closely observing nature and painting directly from life is probably the most important thing a prospective artist can begin to do. By this of course I mean working plein aire for landscapes, but I also mean working directly from the model of any kind, be it the landscape, a still-life arrangement, or a human figure. Working directly from life provides the truest template of that which we're painting. Photographs, reproductions, and so on suffer from the "copy of a copy" syndrome: Information is progressively distorted and lost. Right in front of the artist's eyes, however, the model is crisp and vivid. Granted, this is an intimidating way to paint -- nature is a jumble of information. However, there is only ONE way to learn, and that is to do it. As the student tackles direct work like this, they are forced to hone their observation, selection, and analysis. In other words, work the muscles that will make them an artist.

I don't know at what point the beginner should leave behind the security blanket of learning from manuals: one month? Three months? I suppose it varies. It probably even makes sense to very quickly begin alternating approaches. Finish one painting from the steps in a book, and then immediately after do a small still life from a real arrangement, and then back to the book, and then a small landscape outside. That way the student eases into it. And chances are very, very good that they will quickly learn just how addictive it is to work from life.

Fresh Paint: Shaving Brush

Newly Completed Work:

Shaving Brush
Oil on Panel
6" x 4"
October 16, 2005

Photographing Paintings

Maybe it's my engineering gene, or perhaps it's just creative laziness, but I spend a lot of time tinkering with and improving my studio processes to make them easier and more reliable. Lately I've been having problems with photographing finished paintings. I've been doing a lot of small work, and setting up the tripod, mounting the camera, fiddling with the X-Y-Z axes, and worrying about the lighting has gotten to be a real hassle. Quite literally, making a decent photo of one of my small panels might take fully 1/4 the time it took to paint it in the first place.

I've needed a way to quickly and repeatably take a photo of a small painting, and I've built this "carriage", for lack of a better word.

The painting rests on the board to the left, while the camera fits in the brackets mounted on the square piece of lumber to the right. There is very little room for variation, and therefore error. Just center the painting along the vertical line, put the camera snuggly in place, and click. Placing a strong halogen light shining across the painting, I can have a decent, squared image in less than 5 minutes... every time.

Painting Demonstration

How do you get from this...

to this...

in 10 simple steps? Click here to find out.

Brilliant!

This is hilarious ... in an understated, ironic sort of way. I especially liked that bit about the curator's (unharmed) cat.

Fresh Paint: Balsamic Vinegar

Newly Completed Work:

Balsamic Vinegar
Oil on Canvas on Panel
6" x 3.5"
October 11, 2005

A Realist's take on abstract art

Many, many realist painters are in profound and hostile reaction against modernist art. Just like in politics, when the pendulum swings far in any direction, the rhetoric gets ugly. Taking a look at my own work, which is so deeply enmeshed in the representational tradition, you might get the impression that I have no interest in abstract art.

Not true.

I love looking at designs of any kind -- as a child I used to drag the garden hose out to my sandbox and spend hours observing the patterns made by flowing water. Most of my studio neighbors are modernists, including two kindly old grandmotherly figures who do these big bold canvases. I eat it up. I regularly see abstract art and I try to learn from it. When I'm at my most open-minded (which isn't always), I know that good painting of any kind has something valuable to teach me. I could look at Kandinsky all day long.

I tend to have a liberal definition of what constitutes art. For the most part, if the creator says it's art, I'm pretty much willing to take him or her at their word for it. However, what drives me absolutely crazy is the overlay of a complicated, often pompous aesthetic on top of abstract art: "This piece reflects the state of humanity in the time of blah blah blah..." You know the kind of froth I'm talking about.

Now, extended discussions about form and content just bore me, so I won't start. However, abstract art is by definition, well, abstract. It doesn't refer to anything else but the painter's design sense and the viewer's appreciation for patterns.

I'm all for art making great social or human commentary, but it does it though symbols, and for a symbol to be intelligible, it has to be clear. Spikes and squiggles, while endlessly engaging to look at, are not clear symbols. Any artist who attempts to communicate such ideas through such images is being grossly inefficient, at best.

My own aesthetic is a fairly modest one; I don't have any great commentary or message I'm attempting to convey. That may well come later in life; I recently find myself thinking along more symbolic lines from time to time. But for now, I'm simply content to make paintings that are harmonious and beautiful. In the end, that may be the deepest aesthetic of all. I doubt Chardin, when he was painting his great still lifes, thought of anything but.

In a way, this is fundamentally the abstract tenet: "Just a beautiful painting". I don't see why abstract painters themselves need to sully the integrity of what they do with self-important and meaningless blather. It makes the artists look foolish and it leaves the audience scratching their heads.

Fresh Paint: Lemon and California Roll

Newly Completed Work:

Lemon and California Roll
Oil on Canvas on Panel
4" x 5"
Completed October 9, 2005

Fresh Paint: Smoked Eel Sushi

Not a big fan of sushi for eating, but it is lovely to paint.

Newly Completed Work:

Smoked Eel Sushi
Oil on Canvas on Panel
4" x 6"
Completed October 8, 2005





And...
My studio assistant hard at work:

Fresh Paint: Tomato Pesto

OK, well, this is supposed to be about painting, so... less chattering, more art:

Newly Completed Work:

Tomato Pesto
Oil on Canvas on Panel
5" x 4"
October 5, 2005

And this is a work in progress I'm doing as a commission:



My client had been to my studio on a saturday and liked one painting in particular. Later in the afternoon, the painting sold. When he contacted me a few days after that, I offered to make a similar work for him. I don't generally offer to make exact copies, since it's less interesting for me, and it dilutes the uniqueness of the work. After all, a large part of the appeal of collecting original art is that it is one of a kind. So for this painting, I'm retaining the bottle of oil, which was a prominent feature of the prior painting, but everything else is changed.

Make me a reasonable offer...

Since starting this little venture of running a studio/gallery just over a year ago, I've been surprised by the extent to which I've really had to start thinking like a businessman. In the very beginning, I had some very strong and set ideas about how things would be done: We're going to have this kind of paintings, and they're going to be such-and-such a size, and they're going to cost that much, and people are going to snap them right off the walls, and everything will be great...

Wrong.

Now, I have sold from day one, so from that perspective I've been successful all along, but in reality the first six months were more disappointing than I'd imagined they would have been. At a certain point I started to realize that perhaps my initial viewpoints were mistaken. I could have been obstinate and clung to my original plan -- it seems that many artists do exactly that. While I take tremendous pride in the quality and value of my work, that pride fortunately does not lead to total stubbornness. It was when I started to think flexibly about what we were doing that things really started to change.

As an example, in the beginning I had a lot of large, fairly substantially priced work on the wall, yet most of what I was selling were the small pieces. There is a well-entrenched prejudice in the art world favoring bigger pieces, but I was not benefiting from it. I decided to alter the ratio, foregoing the larger for the smaller. Now, between 60% and 70% of the paintings on the wall are 8x10 and smaller.

Art is of course, a funny commodity, since so many factors integral to the creator get bound up in the mix, not the least being the artist's pride and ego. But in the end, it is exactly that, a commodity. The most important factor determining success is that it be high-quality work that engages both the artist and the audience in an honest way. Beyond that though, the artist's ability to think in terms of the marketplace is paramount; openness and flexibility, attention to customer service, and salesmanship. I imagine these are ongoing learning processes even for those with an innate business sense, which unfortunately I lack -- I need to work hard for these things.

It would be radically premature to talk about the secrets of my success, but if I've learned anything so far, it's that I have to constantly question assumptions, be open to different ideas, and exercise as much flexibility as I possibly can. In other words, check your ego at the door and keep trying new things.

At least, it's been working for me so far...

Instead of Alizarin, why not just use tomato paste??

I guess I'm something of a voyeur at heart. When I'm in public I always watch other people out of the corner of my eye, when I'm at somebody's house I always pay attention to the books they have laying around, and when I visit other artists' studios I always sneak a peak at the paints they put on their palettes. Over and over again, I'm dumbfounded at the frequency of use of Alizarin Crimson.

Now granted, this is a lovely color, and a deep transparent red has many important uses. However, its fugitive nature is very well known and documented. Every materials resource details it. Many artists know about it. Manufacturers always label it with their lowest lightfast rating (usually something like "lightfastness=good", or some such euphamism for "you're really going to regret this.").

The urgency and need to use permanent materials is an interesting topic, and one that I'm saving for another day, but this is an extreme case. We are not talking about changes that will happen 200 years down the road. We are talking about degradation and fading of color in normal circumstances that will happen well within the lifetime of the artist (one hopes)... a matter of a few years, even. And it's potentially an ugly degradation, a fade to a weak pink that could skew the color harmony of the entire work.

Obviously, we can exclude from this discussion those hobbiests who paint for the sheer love of it, and don't really care about posterity. Also, to some extent, students can be excused, because student work should be transient. At least, the hope is that with a few year's experience, most artists will do everything they can to hide or destroy their student efforts. By and large, though, I think the majority of us, certainly those who are professionals or have professional aspirations, sincerely want our paintings to be around for a while, and care about using high-grade materials. Even students, when possible, should not get in the habit of using inferior paints and equipment.

Good alternatives exist. Gamblin has a lightfast formulation with the same properties (haven't tried it). I've used Rembrandt's Permanent Madder for several years, and I've just been experimenting with Holbein's Carmine (using a modern synthetic: PR221), and am so far pleased with it. AND YET... every single paint manufacture whose line I've looked at grinds Alizarin Crimson. Each and every one. Well intentioned painting manuals recommend it's inclusion on the palette. Thoughtful artists -- good painters -- continue to use it.

But hey -- it's not the first time well-founded advice goes ignored. After all, every day on the way in I have to scurry past the smokers out for their morning puff...

And another one...

And The second is SO much easier...

It's a crowded field...

Well, after months of toying with the idea, I've finally listed a piece of art on eBay.




click here to bid

Having run a regular open studio for over a year (and run it very much like a gallery, no less), I am by this point an old hand at the experience of large numbers of people coming through, a certain percent of them having genuine interest, and in turn a certain percent of them actually making a purchase. Posting something on eBay is in a way much less demanding (I'm not standing in front of hundreds of people over the course of an evening), but in another way, it's kind of nerve-wracking. EBay represents a great opportunity to place art in front of a world-wide audience... and everybody want to take advantage of it. There are thousands of artists listing, and given a thumbnail of less than 1 inch square (depending on screen resolution, of course), it's pretty hard to stand out. In these conditions, even Leonardo would have a tough time standing out. I did plan to submit the painting as a featured listing, but eBay requires a feedback of at least 10 to do so, and I'm using a new business account for this. Argh! Given the depth of the field, it's an honest concern that few people would even see the listing.

That said, I think there's some real potential here, and I'm genuinely excited to finally be on this bandwagon... or whatever the appropriate metaphor might be....

When is it a Done Deal?

The other day I was listening to Mahler's 9th Symphony. An old college friend of mine, David Handel, used to heap scorn on the piece ("Oh. That thing..."), arguing that Mahler died before he could give it final revisions and authorizations, and that it was therefore not valid. Now, the musicological discussion of Mahler's revisioning process is not a battle I'm well-armed to fight, or even particularly interested in, and his 9th remains one of my favorite pieces.

It does raise the question though, of when is a work of art finished... how do you know? We deal more or less with abstractions, in the sense that we're extracting some kind of essense and mapping it onto something else. We look at a tree and then put an image of the tree on a canvas. There might be a lot of feedback (does it look like a tree?), but it will NEVER be a perfect copy of the tree, nor should it... slavish copies tend not to make for interesting art. You are therefore NOT exclusively determining "done-ness" based on verisimilitude to the tree.

Some artists seem to not have a problem with this, others clearly struggle. William Bouguereau, the great 19th century French master, churned out finished painting after finished painting in a seemingly unending flow of canvas. I doubt he really struggled with this much at all. Da Vinci, on the other hand, had a relatively small output, and constantly revised his works. He kept a number of paintings with him all his life, and apparently was still working on them when he died. On the musical side, Schubert and Mozart both wrote reams of music in very short lives, while somebody like Bruckner lived twice as long and probably published fewer than 25 or so pieces, revising them constantly. There are multiple versions of many of his pieces, and to the glee of musicologists, there is a ferocious debate about which version is "Final". The problem makes terrific dissertation fodder for aspiring academics.

I often wonder about the significance of the creator's stamp of approval. There are plenty of works that the artist considered "finished" which I think are perfectly awful, then there are pieces like Mahler's 10th, which is an even more extreme case than his 9th. He left it in rudimentary sketch form -- highly fragmentary and incomplete, yet 60 years after his death somebody made a "performing version" of the piece by stitching the existing notes together with newly composed material. Is it Mahler? Is it not Mahler? Does it matter? Whatever the case, it is a tantalizing glimpse into what it might have been. And it's very, very beautiful music... I love it beginning to end.

From my own experience, I guess I'm one of the luckier ones. I don't find myself obsessing over my art. I almost never rework older paintings. My feeling tends to be that if the current one didn't go so well, then I will do better with the next one.

As far as knowing the moment of "doneness", as a painting approaches completion, there does become a sense of tension between the temptation to keep trying to improve it, and the fear of over-working. I've all too often gone too far, and my well-intentioned "fixes" ended up botching the job. I guess part of growing artistic maturity is learning to respect that sense of completion, and go no further. Lately I've taken to enforcing that respect by scraping all the paint off my palette when I feel the moment has arrived.

Complexity and the Still Life

I've been thinking lately about what constitutes good still life, or at least the received wisdom about what constitutes good still life. Most of the still lifes in the canon of great art are fairly complicated, meaty paintings. The ideal seems to be creating deep layerings of textures, forms, light and shadow, and color families, resulting in brainy works that are in a sense "Painter's Paintings". Manet said somewhere that still life was the touchstone of painting, and many artists create real tour de force works in the genre. Fantin-Latour springs to mind, and of course the Dutch beat the pants off everyone.

I've been doing small and simple stills lately, and I've been realizing I have a subconscious prejudice against the value of such work... to be a good still life, it needs to be complicated... anything less than the layered complexity of Dutch still life falls short.

A few moments comtemplating the historical record proves this riduculous. Everybody loves the little goldfinch painting by Fabritius (I'll sidestep the issue of including birds in still lifes), and then of course there's Chardin. His larger stills fit the classical mold, and sit nicely next to the Dutch masters. But there seems to be another strain in his work, towards the much simpler and more intimate painting. Many of his smaller kitchen and food paintings demonstrate this particularly well... just 3 or 4 objects, rendered very simply and directly. This is not flashy art, but the effect is like a punch in the gut; undeniably immediate and powerful. His small paintings are some of his strongest work.

I've been taking this idea even further, to the point of creating small paintings of just one object. While in doing so, it's possible to retain some of the still life ideals (single objects can have multiple planes/textures/color fields, etc), there is a sense in which it works differently. Rather than traditional still life, it becomes more of a "portrait of the object". What they lack in complexity, done correctly they make up in real charm.

So... off to my studio to paint some more miniatures...