Creatively Seeing

In the previous post, “Subject Subjected to Interest,” I showed how pictures originating from different subjects have similar plastic orchestrations, or, as Dr. Barnes asserts, “a picture of a massacre and one of a wedding may be of exactly the same type as works of art.” (The Art in Painting, p.72).

One of my readers asked me this question: Did you find the photos to replicate the paintings or was it the other way around?

It was the other way around.  I noticed the foliage, the flower, or the landscape, and I enjoyed what I saw.  I did not go any further than that.  After I came home, suffering from jet lag and re-entry disorientation, all of a sudden, unbidden, paintings attached themselves to the photos I had taken. 

As I thought about the question asked and my response to it, I identified another question: why do I, and why do you, do this work?  We know it is difficult, takes time, and does not result in fame or fortune (the usual reasons given for undertaking tedious and difficult work). 

An idea emerged—an important one—and I wrote the post.

Ideas sometimes surprise like this.

The idea:  We do this work because appreciating works of art enriches perception.  We do it because appreciating works of art educates visual perception. We do it, simply, because appreciating works of art teaches us how to see—creatively. 

Here’s how.

As you know, I recently returned from a trip to Kauai.  There, I twice visited the National Tropical Botanical Garden.  In the McBryde Garden, I marveled at the curvilinear and angular orchestration of vines, the complex spatial rhythms they created, and the horizontal color bands they pushed back, all of which I described in the previous post, “Subject Subjected to Interest.” Once home, I connected the plastic qualities of those roots to Van Gogh’s painting, Vines, with its similar aesthetic qualities.   

There is more to it, though.  I would not have noticed the vines in the McBryde Garden if I had not already known the Van Gogh painting.  And I would have never connected the two experiences if I had not practiced the objective method.  The Van Gogh painting enabled me to see and enjoy similar qualities in the vines in the McBryde Garden.  I suspect many people walked right by those vines, and they did not stop long enough to appreciate their aesthetic meaning.  

                              
Consequently, my hard work in getting to know Van Gogh’s painting rewarded me by allowing me to enjoy the aesthetic qualities in vines as I walked through a tropical garden.

Convinced?

Here’s another example:

Look at this photograph of the roots of a fig tree (Moreton Bay Fig, or Ficus macrophylla -- a Banyan tree native to Australia) and the following one of the three fig trees I saw in the Allerton Garden:

As I looked at these massive, surging snake-like monsters, I listened to what our guide told us: “Jurassic Park, filmed in the Allerton Garden, used these fig trees in the movie.”

When I got home, I found these pictures of two scenes from the movie:

In Jurassic Park, viewers see two notable specimens of the Moreton Bay Fig Tree. The first is the one Dr. Grant climbs, along with Lex and Tim, to spend the night:

And here is the one when Dr. Grant discovers the dinosaur nest:

These informative facts educated me about the making of a movie.  What I did not yet know was “what wealth the show to me had brought,” as Wordsworth’s poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud says.

As I looked at the fig trees and their roots in the Allerton Garden, I thought: Soutine.

This Soutine:

Gorge du Loup, c. 1920, Galerie Crillon, Paris

Gorge du Loup depicts twisted, tortured roads and valleys in a cataclysmic tangle.  But the aesthetic meaning has to do with surging, writhing, massive, solid, dramatic color units pulsing upwards in space. 

In the Allerton Garden, I followed the palm roots upwards, as they twisted and turned, and dwarfed the people who posed in the spaces they created.  I entered those spaces visually, and felt the dramatic difference between the “wall” of the root and the “canyons” created by them.  I examined the overlapping and receding planes in space contrasted with the sudden rise upwards.  I silently thanked Soutine for making this adventure in perception possible, for awakening me to its possibilities, for causing me to stop and take notice.

That’s the reward for the hard work we do.

Convinced yet?

If not, here is another example:

Look at this photograph of heliconia:

If you walked by this Parrot’s beak heliconia in the Allerton Garden, would you stop to examine its aesthetic qualities? 

You would if you knew Rousseau’s work, as in the following picture:

Monkeys and Parrot in the Virgin Forest, c. 1905-06, Barnes

                             

Rousseau’s painting is a series of triangular rhythms that subtly recede into deep space.  Like the heliconia, small “coasters” (sense focalizing units of red, orange, and blue-white) act as signposts, and they direct the spatial recession.  Units overlap, intersect, and move up and in creating varied spatial rhythms.  That is why I stopped to look and enjoy the heliconia, and I stayed awhile to do so.

Here is one more:

You may be thinking, as I did, that this is a man-made orchestration, that no “real” tree could grow these perfect cascading jewel-like “necklaces.”

I titled it “The Necklace of Seed Pods.”  I took a picture of it on my iPhone, and I showed the picture to the guide.  He told me they were seedpods of a palm tree. 

When I arrived home, I sent my picture in an e-mail to the National Tropical Botanical Garden asking for help in identifying the specific palm tree.  Dr. David H. Lorence, Director of Science, told me my picture shows the fruits of a palm native to the Philippines and Palau (Republic of Belau) in Micronesia.  The scientific name is Pinanga insignis.  In Palau it is called Chebouch. 

What do you see?

I see an upright pole-like unit (tree trunk) punctuated with horizontal green bands from which three sets of downward flowing strings of richly colored beads descend like ornamental necklaces. 

I felt captivated by it because I had experienced an ecological miracle and an aesthetic one.

Suddenly, I remembered this painting by Violette de Mazia:

A Necklace of Boats, 1949, Oil on wood panel, Barnes

In the painting, the triangular “boats” hang on brightly colored lines and stretch horizontally across the picture plane.  The triangular color shapes rhythmically echo in the reflections in the “water” and contrast with the blobby background “foliage” that undulates across the picture plane.  The “string” of color shapes hangs slightly in front of four horizontal color bands.  Compressed shallow space gives the entire ensemble a rigid, claustrophobic atmosphere, very different from the cascading quality of the palm pods.

Yet, the contrasting dots of color in the palm pods, the horizontality of the trunk’s bands, and the vivid, saturated color of the repeating units, speak much the same language.

With a mind educated by aesthetic appreciation, everything encountered becomes visually enriching. 

If you continue to use the objective method, and keep doing all the hard work genuine aesthetic appreciation demands, your everyday world will reward you with visual gifts to enjoy.

“Creatively Seeing, Part II,” the next post, will describe the “rooms” Robert Allerton created.

  

                                                                                        

                      

                                                                                                                                              

Subject Subjected to Interest

You thought we were finished with this topic, didn’t you?

I thought so too.

However, I just returned from a two-week visit to Kauai and, during my stay in this tropical paradise, the plants I saw kept talking to me.  Fascinated at the difference between how they looked and what use artists had made of their qualities, I kept saying “Van Gogh would have loved this,” or “Matisse used these colors and shapes.”  Neither one visited Kauai.  But they each were sensitive to similar qualities in the subjects they experienced in their own world.

Dr. Barnes argues “It is no easy task for a novice to banish from his mind the independent interest of the subject-matter and to fix his attention upon the manner in which color, line, space, and light are employed and interrelated; it involves the breaking up of a set of old, firmly riveted habits and the beginning of new ones.” (Art in Painting, 72-73)

You know this.

Indulge me this jet-lagged foray into familiar territory.  My defense: I give it all a new twist (literally).

For example, look at this photograph of vines that grow in the McBryde Garden in Kauai’s National Tropical Botanical Garden:

Woody liana Entada phaseoloides 

The vines are climbing over a Monkey Pod tree.  The common name is the St. Thomas Bean. 

Now do what we do: describe their plastic qualities (light, line, color, and space).

You will come up with something like: a vertical series of dramatic curvilinear, angular, and twisted rhythms decoratively setting off a series of horizontal wavy bands.

Now look at this picture by Van Gogh:

Vines, 1890, Van Gogh Museum

Look closely at the Van Gogh.  Notice how linear brush strokes echo the palm fronds in the top right of the photograph as well as the short, light, thin strips of branches on the foreground.

Of course, there are many differences as well. List them.

My point is not to compare and contrast these two pictures, but to stress a simple fact: where genuine interest drives inquiry, you will be unable to focus solely on the subject because you have already built the habit of aesthetic perception.  This now operates automatically.  You don’t get distracted.

Now look at this photograph of a view from Kukuiolono Park in Kalāheo:

Again, describe its light, line, color, and space.

Here is what I would say: a vertical repoussoir on the right pushes back a series of brightly colored rectilinear bands; they, in turn, push back a lower series of variegated patches of ochre and deep green.  These patches are interspersed with triangular verticals that recede into deeper space.  The spatial recession stops at a strip of dark brown, above which a wider band of deep blue connects with a band of grayed white to box in the middle wedge.  The light, white shapes at the top echo the rhythms of the landscape as they float in front of the lighter blue horizontal band.   

Now compare it to this Matisse painting:

The Sea Seen from Collioure, 1906, Barnes

                    

One big difference between the Matisse and the photograph is the circular framing device Matisse employs.  Do you see it?  If you follow the left moving “tree branch” you will see it connect to the change in the “water” from dark blue on the left to a lighter cerulean.  That “skewer” in turn connects to the left of the red “pizza slice,” which then connects to the black descending line that moves toward the “tree trunk.”  

And yet, those oranges, ochres, and greens—they captivate our eye.  Decorative, enticing, rich, compelling: qualities of both.

The point of this short post, then, is this:  to an educated eye, attention is fixed upon the manner on which color, line, space, and light are employed and interrelated. 

I soon will see the current exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Acadia.  If you have any questions or topics you would like to me address, please click here and let me know.   

Reign of Error

The Van Gogh Up Close exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art closes today.  I’m sorry about that, because I intended to write several more posts based on individual pictures in it.

What I will write instead has to do with the “blockbuster” success of this exhibit, not that that is a bad thing.  It isn’t.

What concerns me has to do with the idea of “self-guided” tours that have very little to do with the “self.”

When the students in my Van Gogh Seminar attended the exhibit at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, we were some of the first to enter.  Some of the first does not quite paint the correct picture: hordes of us entered at 10 and hordes more followed every few minutes.  The guards admonished our group of 15 “not to speak to each other” about the pictures, but to “self-guide.”  Translation: listen mutely to the information given through the headphones.

Fortunately, I had provided my students a Study Guide.  This enabled them to focus on individual work and to scrutinize several pictures closely so they could answer the questions I posed.

My questions had to do with the aesthetic information they were to uncover via objective analysis. 

Our “self” experiences what is in the work and is very different from our “receptacle” that collects what someone else says about the work.

By that I mean, when we confront a painting, we must use everything we have learned:  (1) how to uncover visual meaning in works of art; (2) how to read color and determine creativity; and (3) how to appreciate aesthetic achievement.  All by ourselves.

My students and I have been attempting something even more challenging.  We have been trying to decide for ourselves if Dr. Barnes’ assessment of Van Gogh’s achievement remains as credible today, May 6, 2012, as it was when he wrote it in 1925.  Never one to gush, Dr. Barnes said this:

His color is bright, often exotic, and usually employed in daring contrasts; but it lacks structural quality, it does not often function effectively in organizing the painting, and rarely adds anything expressive to the form.  His pictures are always rhythmic, but the rhythms are obvious and usually mechanical.  The result is that the total compositional activity of the color is chiefly decorative, and the technical means of achieving animated effects and striking patterns are rather specious and overaccentuated.  His compositions are generally flat, his drawing and modeling are relatively unvaried and not very original (The Art in Painting, p. 334).

Do we agree?

I began this discussion in the previous two posts (Is This the Sun? and Is This the Sun? Cont’d).  Those posts discussed two of Van Gogh’s paintings in which he used olive trees as his subject.

This time, let’s study this picture:

Houses at Auvers, 1890, MFA Boston

It’s at moments like this when I simply want to sigh, smile, and revel in the colorfulness and liveliness I see. 

It’s then I hear the ghosts of Dr. Barnes and Violette de Mazia whispering to me: “Get a grip, girl.  Go to work,” they say.

When I turn the picture upside down, I can do just that:

Now I see a crumpled section of wiggling, flowing, ins and outs of rectilinear and curvilinear striated vivid color shapes occupying ¾ of the picture.  The remaining ¼ blue color band slips behind the larger section and converts curling motifs of “trees” and “shrubs” into interlocking curls of “clouds” that move horizontally across that background plane.

Here are some cropped details:

This first one, of the thatched roof, orchestrates rows of insistent repeated striations of olive, black, orange, and brown tones within a curved flattened color plane.  The “cottage” sets back and moves slightly in and out via horizontal rectilinear dabs of light blue and cerulean on a lavender ground.  To the right, longer, vertical strips of creamy white, muted greens and blues are held within darker outlines—like empty vertical boxes. 

This second one reaffirms the motifs:  the “road” is swept up (not back) then left (including its “shadow”), and wraps around the “cottage,” pulsing with movement.  These fluid triangular shapes of long, overlapping pulled bands rise slightly on the far right to create a small, ledge-like structure.  The green/tan “figure” moves in much the same way the curl of “foliage” does on the top left of the ledge-like unit. 

Notice, too, how the lower edge of the “thatched roof” sits on a descending step-like unit of projecting “house” and ascending “step-like” bushes.

The above detail of “sky” shows the cerulean/lavender color harmonies repeated but now writ large and dramatic and broken by “chain-like” links of pink/blue/white color arcs that push leftwards across it.  Below, dark lines rhythmically repeat the interlocking chain motif of the “clouds.”

This cropped detail, once again, exhibits what we now expect:  linear short color stripes contained within light boxy color shapes bend and swirl across the picture plane.  Of all the rooftops, however, one is not modulated: the red one.  Every other rectilinear color unit is animated by either vertical stripes or horizontal ones.  The red one, however, is a flat, opaque rectangle.

As a practitioner of the objective method, I have to call it as I see it.  No matter how much I love this picture, no matter how happy the color and the dynamic movement of the color shapes makes me, it has “issues” as we would say today.  Violette de Mazia calls them “holes.” 

Here is what she said about Van Gogh’s painting “House and Figure”:

Houses at Auvers, 1890, MFA Boston

“Here, although a measure of unity is imposed by the twisted shape of the area that makes up
the red roof of the cottage in the foreground, the lack of variations in the color of the brush strokes creates a break in the organic unity of the picture, and the roof is a hole” (E Pluribus Unum—Cont’d: Part IV, p. 32)

I continue to love this one as well.

If you have been reading these posts for this long, you know what we do takes time, effort, and patience.  All we have is our own interest, curiosity and the objective method to guide us.  The Reign of Error assumes all we need is information about the works of art: facts, dates, subjects used, history, biography.    

I do not know yet what my students will conclude about Van Gogh’s achievement.  I can say, thanks to the Van Gogh Up Close exhibit and our work together, we have had an intense, exciting, and rewarding experience getting to know Vincent van Gogh’s work.  If anything, we have affirmed a basic truth: creation is messy.  Not all pictures are perfect.  There are levels of genuine achievement lower than the loftiest.

Van Gogh’s work continues to provide me with ways of seeing I could not have attained had he not shown them to me in his pictures.

Is This the Sun? Cont'd

In the last post, “Is This the Sun?” I asked you to study two paintings by Vincent van Gogh in which he used olive trees as his subject.

Here they are:

 Olive Trees, 1889, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Olive Trees, 1889, Museum of Modern Art

Before I demonstrate their similarities and differences, I will explain another ingredient all artists use to make a picture: the traditions of art. I have discussed this before in previous posts:  “Loper’s Link”;  “Seeing is Believing, Part II”; “How Creation Happens”; “How Creation Happens, Cont’d”; “Making Connections”; “Tackling Transfers.”

To make pictures, artists transform their subjects into picture ideas.  To do so, they orchestrate light, line, color, and space, and adapt relevant traditions of art.

Here’s how it works.

My 7-year-old granddaughter showed me a drawing she made in school:

Kaari Bowman, Picasso Mixed with Awesomeness, 2012

 When I asked her to tell me about her picture, she explained that her art teacher showed her class  these drawings by Picasso:

Picasso, Pictures from a Sketchbook

 

Her teacher also explained cubism and distortion.  She then asked the students in the class to draw a portrait using the visual ideas they had learned.

Kaari told me she made each eye different, one bigger and one smaller, and each looking in a different direction.  She told me she especially liked how she “distorted” the nose and mouth.  She used a player from her favorite NFL team, the Falcons, as her subject, but #28 did not refer to any specific player; she just liked the way the number looked. 

I asked her about the almond shaped repetitive patterns on the “shirt.” I thought they were particularly rhythmic, repeating the shape of the eyes.  I thought she might have made an aesthetic decision. 

“Oh, no, Grandma,” she said, “I made them to show the holes in the shirt’s “mesh.”

Did I say she is seven years old?

Creation happens when one budding artist borrows visual ideas from another artist, adjusts the ideas to a new interest, and goes to work.

Van Gogh did this too.

Now let’s explore his pictures upside down:

Alisa Bowman (yes, she is Kaari’s mother) stated the differences this way:

The "sun" picture: Warm, yellows and burnt hues, wavy lines, lots of curves, three somewhat triangular pieces/planes wedged together.

The "cloudy day" one: Blues, colder (but still warm when compared to other pictures), blues and greens, wavy lines, four bumpy planes sandwiched and stacked on top of each other.

If we look at enlarged details, we see this:

The small, rectilinear color shapes van Gogh uses in the “sun” picture originated in mosaics.  Look at the following detail from Justinian and his Court:

Ravenna Mosaic: San Vitale, Justinian and His Court (Justinian, detail), 526-48

 

Notice how the tesserae circle the “head.”  Notice how the combination of the rectilinear tiles and the color outlines around the “face,” the “nose,” the “eyes,” the “ears” compartmentalize the colors.  Notice how the curvy directional tiles help build a slight three-dimensionality in the “face.” Even though this is a static orchestration, notice how the very placement of the tiles makes all of the units “move” in a circular motif.

In the “sun” picture, the animation derives from the nature of the brush strokes combined with the gnarled orchestration of “tree trunks,” the circular spinning of “foliage,” and the strands of “shadows” that resemble ponytails flying unattached to racing ponies.  Units of “trees” pull left and right; the “sky” meets the “mountains” and “treetops” in a soft V, while the entire “sky” unit swirls and loops, and the entire “undergrowth” undulates and bulges like molten lava.

Now look at this detail of the “foliage” in the “trees”:

The rectilinear brush strokes rise upwards and fold over like bowed heads.  This circular movement echoes the swirling activity in the “sky” and “sun.”  However, in the “foliage,” the rounded units bulge forward.  In the “sky” and the “sun,” the circular motion is centrifugal and sucks the round yellow color unit into a vortex that recedes in space. 

In the “cloud” picture, we see another van Gogh adaptation of tradition, this time from Delacroix:

Delacroix, Good Samaritan, 1849, Private Collection 

                       Good Samaritan (after Delacroix), 1890, Van Gogh Museum                   

    

     
Van Gogh adapts Delacroix’s pulled brush strokes into looser, more obvious “stripes.” He does so for the same reason Delacroix did so: to express movement, but van Gogh’s strips of color are more obvious and omnipresent than Delcroix’s.

In the “cloud” picture, these linear color units swirl and curl, creating horizontal rhythms that recede into deeper space.  They flow backwards like an ebbing tide and the “clouds” continue the undulating push into deep space. 

Look again at the picture right side up and notice how much further back in space that “cloud” unit appears.  Look at how it “mounds” into soft bulges like an upturned paw.  Look at how it repeats the roiling mounds of “foliage” and “mountains.”

That, briefly, is the art in these two pictures. The art has very little to do with the weather, where the sun was or might have been, or where the “shadows” were or might have been.  Van Gogh birthed a new visual idea each time he encountered his subject and, in each picture, he recorded what he discovered thereby permitting us to understand it. 

If we look carefully.

Finally, here are several photographs of his subject.

Olive orchard with the Alpilles in the background, 1986. Photograph by Jean Delrieux (printed in Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers, Ronald Pickvance, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986, p. 160)

Olive Trees in the Fields of San Remy, Photograph, Van Gogh Museum website

Olive Grove and Les Alpilles, Photograph, Van Gogh Museum website

As you can see, van Gogh invented new matter (aka color stuff) for each of his pictures.  He expressed the meaning of his aesthetic experience, his adventure in perception, as he subjected each subject of olive trees to a new interest.

Before my next post, examine the following picture, and compare and contrast it to the ones discussed in this one:

Vincent van Gogh, The Olive Orchard, 1889, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection  

Is This the Sun? An Examination of Van Gogh Up Close

Is this the sun?

If not, what is it?

Is this a cloud?

If not, what is it?

I ask you these questions because they came up in a recent class I taught at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Wilmington.

This was the 7^th class, and I was feeling buoyed by the progress of my 70 students.  They "were getting it," or so I thought.

Since many of them had either gone to see or were going to see Van Gogh Up Close at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I showed them the following two pictures by Vincent van Gogh.  In both, he used olives trees as his subject. 

Olive Trees, 1889, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Olive Trees, 1889, Museum of Modern Art

During this class, I explained how a picture is born.  I used this chart, which you may remember from the post “What’s the Matter”:

My students indicated by their responses and questions they understood the following points:

1.     An artist encounters a subject, and it acts on him, and he acts back on it: at that moment, he sees something in that subject that interests him and everything changes.

2.     At the moment of that first “interested” look, the artist discovers an idea, a purpose, an intent, a goal—this is not verbal; it is a color idea. 

3.     To make the picture, he invents new “matter” (I call this “color stuff”) by creating new relationships among light, line, color, and space (his means).

4.     He works all this out by painting the picture.

5.     When he is finished, as Matisse said, he looks at the picture as a mother looks at her newborn baby: with the hope of understanding it.

All good, so far.

Then a student raised her hand.  She said, “I think the difference in those two pictures is the weather.  In one, it was sunny; in the other, it wasn’t.”

Such is the seduction of the subject.

So, I ask you again: is this the sun?

No, of course it isn’t.  It is a flat series of small, rectilinear yellow and orange color shapes that spiral around a series of small, rectilinear yellow color shapes that spiral within an orange-banded circle.

Is this a cloud?

No, it isn’t.  It is a curvy series of yellow, light blue, pink, and tan lines that swirl into light mounds and float from left to right.

We started again.

I turned both pictures upside down and asked them to examine the composition of each, the light, line, color, and space in each, and then state the picture idea of each of them.

 I reminded them of what Matisse said:

“The object [subject] is an actor, . . . it must act powerfully on the imagination. . . . The artist’s feelings, expressing themselves through it, must make it worthy of interest; it says only what one makes it say.”   (quoted by de Mazia, in “Subject and Subject Matter,” Vistas, Spring-Summer 1980, Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 48)

And I reminded them of what John Dewey said: “The work is formed matter.” (Art as Experience, p. 114).

In other words, van Gogh made pictures.  He made them based on the meaning of his aesthetic experience as he interacted with his subject.  He made pictures, not olive trees on a sunny or a cloudy day. 

Now I ask you to do what I asked them to do:  look at these two pictures and describe what you see.

Send me your perceptions by e-mail (click here). 

In the next post, I will review your submissions and continue this discussion.