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.

The How and the Why

Dr. Megan Hunt, the testy medical examiner played by Dana Delany on ABC’s Body of Proof, in a recent episode, told a forensic pathology student she must “first find the how and then the why.”

We must do this too.

In a former post (What to Look for in Art, Cont’d), I quoted John Ciardi.  In his book, How Does a Poem Mean? Ciardi argues poems hold their meanings in the relationships among their means.  To understand poems, you must know the language of word sounds.

For us as well, the question needing an answer is not “what does a picture mean?” but “how does a picture mean?”  We learn and use the language of color.

If we were a forensic pathologist doing an autopsy, therefore, we would first determine how the person died.  Then we would try to find out why (and, in the case of the TV show, by following the clues our forensic scrutiny revealed, we would figure out who committed the murder). 

If we think of our work as doing an autopsy on a picture, we first determine how its body of color evidence looks: (1) its relationships of light, line, color, and space and what qualities those relationships express; (2) its composition or plan; (3) its rhythms and motifs.  In other words, we dissect it, and we look for clues.

We are not looking for a cause of death.  Quite the opposite.  We are looking to bring alive its visual sensuous information, its aesthetic meaning. 

Only after we do that are we able to ask why: why was it all done this way? And the answer to that question reveals the BIG IDEA, the visual experience recorded in the picture.

In the last post (To Thine Own Self Be True), I asked you to examine this picture by Edward L. Loper, Sr.

The Magnificent Bouquet, 2009, Private Collection

The first time I saw this picture, I feel in love with its vivid reds and its luminosity.

I started, therefore, with a preference.  However, as Dr. Barnes said in The Art in Painting, “…the method gives results as objective as possible within any field of aesthetic experience and…it reduces to a minimum the role of merely personal and arbitrary preference. Preference will always remain, but its existence is consistent with a much higher degree of objective judgment than at present prevails.”

Let’s see if I can be objective.

First, I always turn pictures upside down:

Now when I look at it, I see shallow, almost claustrophobic space.  I start questioning myself: seems like a hodge-podge of colors without a focus; confusing; a jumble.

That surprises me.  Why did I like it so readily when it was right side up, and now I can’t find a place to start?  Since I can’t answer this question, I keep looking.

As I do, I notice that units start to move backwards: in the frontal plane a circular mass of red, orange, and yellow color strips joins forces with a dark flattened rectangle (aka the vase), a dark ovoid volume (aka eggplant) and a curly medium blue funnel (aka drapery) that wraps around all three units.  This entire unit floats in front of the darkened background to its right.  To its left, another lighter gray/white rectangle (aka cloth) slips back pushing forward the white bowl of red grapes.  The entire ensemble sits on a tilted forward pushing ledge backed by a vertical brownish rectangle.  Behind all this, an amorphous dark space causes the entire structure to float.

It reminds me of the pop-up books my grandchildren love, and how the  contents jump out when they open them. 

Ah, I think: drama.  A color drama of rich, vivid, glowing units set in subtle spatial intervals and looming forward.

That’s a start.

If you analyze what I just did, you will see how I study a picture.  It is not the only or the best way; it is my way.

You may find making lists of the plastic means (the light, line, color, and space) works best for you.  So long as you are looking at color units in space and not flowers and fruit, you can’t go wrong.

After that start, I go on.  Upside down, I now see strips of color applied side by side.  The strips build each unit.  Look at the following (right side up) cropped enlargement:

Each color unit orchestrates strips of color.  If these color strips look familiar to you, as they did to me, you are thinking Van Gogh. 

Look at this picture:

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1887, Rijksmuseum

Notice how Van Gogh builds color units by applying strips of color side by side, not just in the sunflowers but also in the background.

The difference, however, between Loper’s ribbonlike brush strokes and Van Gogh’s is that Loper’s are not linear.  Van Gogh draws lines to create a striking pattern of line and color.  Loper pulls his bands, or applies them with a heavier application of pigment.  This results in a less decorative statement and a more expressive one.  Van Gogh contrasts the dynamic quality of his banded streaks of striking, vivid color units producing an active, lively color statement, but the result is not as moving aesthetically compared to Loper’s more structurally powerful form. 

The reds in the Loper attracted some of you.  Beth Ann Kessler saw a similarity between Loper’s reds and those of Biagio Pinto.  What do you think?

Biagio Pinto, Modernist Still Life, 50 x 40 inches, n.d., Private Collection

Full disclosure: Biagio Pinto (1911-1989), was born in Philadelphia, studied at the School of Industrial Arts and the Barnes Foundation as well as in England, France, Italy, and Spain.  Two of his five brothers, Angelo and Salvatore, were painters.  Angelo Pinto was my traditions' instructor at the Barnes Foundation.

Tom Del Porte said this about the Loper:

Nothing quiet about this... from the hot colors to the sliding diagonal lines... even the eggplant looks like it might roll at any second. It's not Cezanne. It's not Renoir or Soutine... it has some of their soul, but no bones there... Even Carravaggio is whispering in there...
To me this is an excitement... a shiver of tension, a shout of glee.

Diana Meyers Bennett Roberts said this:

In some ways, this painting has characteristics I associate with van Gogh: an explosive exuberance of color and brush strokes. In another way, I am reminded of Cezanne, but a failed Cezanne. The severe tilt of the objects sliding off to the right (facing the painting) are not sufficiently held back by an object or opposite tilting line. For me the work lacks the tension of balance/imbalance that keeps your eye constantly moving in Cezanne's still lifes. That said, however, doesn't take away for me the pleasure of looking at this painting over and over and joining in its dance!

These all are good places to start.  As you keep looking, fueled now by your interest and clues, you will find more and more either to support or refute your hypothesis.

As I continue my adventure, I see the twisted yellow strips now at the top (of the inverted picture).  I enjoy their bony finger-like projections setting off the receding space between the “digits.”  I see how the spatial recessions are subtle and shallow, reinforcing my original picture idea. 

Then I find their repetitions in the bird of paradise units, in the crenelated edges of the flowers, and in the spiky trio of color units now at the bottom.  These rhythms create aesthetic satisfaction.  I enjoy them.

Continuing my exploration, I look to see what holds this picture together.  I am curious if my upside down picture unifies and balances.  The more I look, the more I conclude that, unlike Cézanne, Loper does not resolve a perceived imbalance by creating an architectonic structure to pull the units into equilibrium.  That downward and right tilt of what was a table top with its right and left sides creating a perspective push back in space is so tilted the entire picture seems off balance.

And then I look some more: the markings on that rectilinear unit of tabletop, like rescue girders, pin each color unit in place.  Look below the white bowl on the right (right side up now).  See that vertical pinkish-grey band?  Look at the base of the dark vase.  See that vertical brownish-pink vertical band? Look how the light area to the left of the eggplant skewers the blue-grey cloth.  Look at the leftward tilt of the dark vase.  Notice how all the color units that were flowers follow a darkened path to the top of the picture.

That one darkened pathway pulls all the tilted units leftward and helps balance the entire picture.

You can find many more skewers.  Keep looking.  They all serve the same purpose: to hold the color units in place and to balance the entire picture with an underpinning of directional thrusts. 

Since the reds seduced me, I knew I needed to decide whether they were derivative.  The only way to do this is to determine what Loper gave back to the traditions from which he borrowed. 

In a previous post (Making Connections), I traced Loper’s warm glow back to Renoir and Bonnard. I argued that Loper’s luminosity resulted from dabs of intense, juxtaposed color along with layering of color on color in order to build structurally solid color volumes that lure, beguile, and captivate the eye.  I have not changed my mind.  However, in this picture, the resulting luminosity, the lure of the red, occurs not because of “dabs of intense, juxtaposed color along with layering of color on color” but because of the application of color bands that build volumes coupled with dabs of color applied to them that make them glow.   Biagio Pinto’s vivid, vibrant reds, set off by clean-cut, clear spatial atmosphere, do not smolder.  They achieve their color drama from the contrasts created by the color units around them. 

In this picture, then, the ribbons of color surprised me.  Still, the resulting picture takes its place with Loper’s late work. In all of his pictures of the past 10 years, luminosity unifies the design.  Because of Loper’s adaptation of the broken color of the impressionists via both Cézanne and Renoir, his color strokes tend to echo and repeat each other whether they occur in dabs or strips, creating intricate rhythms that move the eye from one color unit to another.  Continuous successions of color-chords fill each canvas and create a color-in-light suffusion. 

My next post, titled “What’s Next?” will offer you some choices.  I spent four days in New York City recently to celebrate my birthday, and I visited the Met (with its stunning renovated American Wing), MoMA, the Neue Gallerie, and the Frick, along with seeing a David Parsons Dance performance, War Horse (the theatre production, not the movie), "The Artist" (the movie), and the 9/11 Memorial.

I came home with many ideas for future posts.  In the next post, I will share some of them with you and ask you to let me know which ones I should pursue.

To Thine Own Self Be True

For the past few days, I felt prodded to write another post, not by a new idea, or by a work of art that moved me, but by “hints” from disparate places that seemed directed to me.  One came from a student who asked me to “tell her” exactly what “she was supposed” to see in a picture.  Another came in my horoscope in my local paper (yes, I sometimes read them).  It said: “Your sign mate Ellen DeGeneres said, ‘Stay true to yourself.  Never follow someone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path.  By all means, you should follow that.”

I liked that one.

Then I read in the New York Times (Sunday, January 15, 2012) that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.  In fact, introverts, the psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, are creative by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand.”  They do not get distracted by matters unrelated to work.

Finally, as I was looking for a quote by Dr. Barnes in The Art in Painting, I saw (for the first time after reading this book for more than 45 years) this statement in the preface to the first edition: “It is not presumed that the conclusions reached with regard to particular paintings are the only ones compatible with the use of the method: any one of them is of course subject to revision.  What is claimed is that the method gives results as objective as possible within any field of aesthetic experience and that it reduces to a minimum the role of merely personal and arbitrary preference. Preference will always remain, but its existence is consistent with a much higher degree of objective judgment than at present prevails.”

I had no choice.

I had to tackle, again, preference as it relates to aesthetic appreciation.

I say “again” because you might think I exhausted this issue in the past four posts:

(1)  What’s Feeling Got To Do With It? (2) What’s the Subject Got To Do With It?
(3) Subject Facts, Picture Facts, and Us and (4) The Means Justify the End, but this time the emphasis is different.

This time I want to explain how our own reluctance to approach this work by ourselves, in solitude, without listening to what anyone else (particularly an expert) tells us, or what our friends think, or what our teachers say, or what the wall labels tell us, or the headphones tell us, or what we read in books, magazines, and newspapers—that reluctance prevents us from making honest, personal, and creative discoveries.

The analyses you read in these posts are shorter and less scholarly then those in the books and essays written by Dr. Barnes and Violette de Mazia.  I use fewer allusions.  I write shorter sentences.  I use a simpler vocabulary.  That I do this keeps me up nights.  I agonize over my “shortcomings.”  I worry I do not do justice to the method or the work of art I explain.  Mostly, I feel inferior to their “legacy” and intimidated by the innovative contribution they made to aesthetic appreciation, their dedication to their work, and their fierce defense of their discoveries.

My life would definitely be easier, less stressful, and more fun if I functioned either as a student of Ed Loper or a student of Barnes and de Mazia. 

You are thinking, I am sure: “They are all dead.  You could not have continued as their student.” 

Ah, but I could. 

While Ed Loper and I remained friends, I stopped studying with him 25 years before he died.  I stopped because I had to figure out where his vision ended and mine began. 

As with these posts, for many years I worried my painting suffered.  I feared I did not have what it took to do my work on my own with no help from anyone.  I struggled to make decisions about my work.  Sometimes I had no idea what to do with a picture, and I had to put it away and take it out again a long time later.  I missed his classes, the group of Loper students who hung out together, traveled together, and had parties together.  I felt lonely.

What kept me going was Ed Loper’s life story.  He taught himself. He worked alone.  He hit dead ends.  And he kept working.  He may have been a tyrant to his students, and he definitely liked to paint other people’s pictures by “telling” them what to do, but no one, absolutely no one, told him what to do.  He struggled with his pictures himself. 

Artists do that.

Violette de Mazia believed an artist’s vision was a special and fragile thing.  She told a story of Dr. Barnes and Soutine to make this point.  She said Soutine begged Dr. Barnes for a long time to tell him what his weaknesses were.  Dr. Barnes resisted.  But one day he told Soutine that some of his pictures lacked organization. 

When he returned to see Soutine the following year, Soutine proudly showed him his new work and declared them “better organized.”  However, the Soutine-ness that Dr. Barnes admired—the animation, motion, vividness, intensity, and drama—was compromised.  Dr. Barnes later argued that “the bulk of [Soutine’s] work is very uneven—excess of intensity prevents synthesis of all the parts of the picture into an organic whole, even when individual units are effectively done.” (Art in Painting, 375).  Despite his shortcomings, Barnes said, Soutine, at his best, compared “in strength and dramatic power with important painters of the past and present.” 

Dr. Barnes practiced objective judgment.  This results in measured evaluation, not adoration.

If, therefore, I had continued to act like a student of Ed Loper even after I no longer studied with him, and I did not attempt to find out what interested me and how to solve my own aesthetic problems, I would have been a “Loperino,” an acolyte making pictures that were more his than mine.  Better to make bad Bauman’s than derivative Loper’s, I told myself.

Same thing with these posts.  If all I did here was summarize what I learned at the Barnes Foundation, I doubt you would be reading them.  They are not as learned or groundbreaking as my predecessors’ explanations, but they are mine.  They grow out of my experience. 

Here is my point.  If you do not approach a picture and see it as a challenge you can confront, as an adventure you are equipped to undertake, or as work you and you alone are able to do, you will continue to rely on what others say, what I say, what other readers say, and you will not gain confidence by jumping in and doing the best you can.  What do you have to lose?  Maybe you will feel embarrassed if you miss something important in a picture, but as far as I can tell, there is nothing life threatening about this.

For the start of this New Year, I invite you to look at this painting by Edward Loper, Sr.  As always, see what you see.  Spend some time with it.  Turn it upside down if that helps.  Do this before you read my next post.

As Warren Buffet says, “Put some skin in the game.”  Do not sit back and wait for me or anyone else to do this work for you. 

If you wish, share your discoveries with me via e-mail (click here).  I look forward to hearing from you.

The Magnificent Bouquet, 2009, Private Collection

Lost Art and How to Restore It

My New Year began with a treat.  My granddaughter, Lily, a third grader, attends Schuylkill Elementary School.  Each month, her teacher invites a “mystery reader” to come in and read a book to the class.  Before the event, she provides some clues to the reader’s identity.  The children try to guess who it is.

My clues were: someone who works with colors; someone who likes to go to museums; someone who makes things to see.

On January 3, Lily guessed it was me.

I read When Pigasso met Mootisse by Nina Laden, a delightful tale of Pigasso, a talented pig, meeting Mootisse, an artistic bull, and their relationship.

At the end of the book, biographies of Matisse and Picasso tell the “real” story.

In the real story, Matisse said this to Picasso: “We must talk to each other as much as we can.  When one of us dies, there will be some things the other will never be able to talk of with anyone else.”


That gave me pause.

While I never said those exact words to Ed Loper (see the post Mysticism in Art), I certainly understand their veracity.  What are the “things” artists talk about with each other?  Why are they unable to talk with anyone else about them?

Here’s why.

I brought in a few of my paintings to show the students.  They wanted to know: (1) If I was famous; (2) How much each painting cost; (3) How long it took to paint each one.

I told them none of that mattered to me, that fame and fortune were overrated.  I painted pictures because I loved the process.  When I see a world full of color and meaning, I am happy.  I told them it was hard work, but my reward came when someone looked at one of my pictures and appreciated it, enjoyed it by understanding it.  I told them each picture took 70 years to paint, because that is how long I have been seeing.

Their eyes glazed over.

This is heady stuff for 8 year olds.

But it is what Ed and I would discuss. 

When I visited him a few weeks before he died, I told him I wrote about his picture Table and Flowers (see Pentimento).   I asked him why he no longer “fractured” his spatial planes.  I asked him why he now adapted visual ideas from Renoir and Bonnard rather than Cézanne. 

He told me he could not paint “that way” anymore. 

“Could not, or would not?” I questioned.  “Could not,” he said.  “I see differently now,” he told me.

“But you always argued Renoir was a dead end.  You said he did not leave any ideas for other artists to develop.” 

He gave me one of his “looks,” a combination of a smirk and a challenge: “I haven’t the least idea.  You figure it out,” he said.

And so it went.  We talked about the loneliness of making pictures.  We talked about how hard it was, as time went on, to feel inspired.  We talked about the strength of our interest in doing the work.

When I read to him what I had written about his picture, he thanked me.  He said, “I had no idea I did all that.”

The best compliment I ever received.

Dr. Barnes said:

To see as an artist sees is an accomplishment to which there is no short cut, which cannot be acquired by any formula or trick; it requires not only the best energies of which we are capable, but a methodical direction of those energies, based upon scientific understanding of the meaning of art and its relation to human nature. (Art in Painting, 7)  

This New Year, I thank Albert Barnes, Violette de Mazia, Angelo Pinto, Harry Sefarbi, Barton Church, and Edward Loper for inviting me into their world.  Their teaching and/or writing and painting informed my vision and my life. 

You, the readers of and responders to these posts, by your commitment to this process, continue the conversation.  We talk of “these things” with each other, and in so doing, according to Dr. Barnes, we build up the habits of perception and background which admit us to the world of aesthetic experience.       

The Means Justify the End

Machiavelli had it backwards.  For us, it is not “the end justifies the means,” but the means that justify the end.  In other words, you must pay attention to all the plastic means—light, line, color, space, subject, and tradition—as you search for the art in a painting. 

At the end of my last post (“Subject Facts, Picture Facts, and Us”), I asked you to examine two pictures: Renoir’s Pomegranates and Soutine’s Flayed Rabbit.  I also asked you to reconcile, in each picture, if the starting point (aka the subject) affected the outcome (aka what effect, if any, did the subject contribute to the expressive meaning?).  If it did, describe it.

Your responses accurately stated the similarities:  sinuous line and shape, juicy, rich, and vibrant color, and structurally rendered, centered volumes set off by a platform device.  In each picture, the central volume is “split open,” or “exposed,” which one of you described as an “inside out” presentation.

Here are the two pictures:

Renoir, Pomegranates,c. 1910, Barnes

Soutine, Flayed Rabbit, c. 1921, Barnes

The two paintings are expressive of such qualities as dramatic activity, color richness, gritty unctuosity, and luminosity. 

Yet, all of you said the Soutine picture repulsed you—the “Yuk effect.”

In short, we feel differently about a depiction of a skinned rabbit on a tabletop than we do about pomegranates. 

How do those “human values” relate to the picture idea?

We faced a similar dilemma in the post “What’s the Subject Got to Do With It?” when we confronted Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons:

1821-23, Plaster mounted on canvas, Prado

In this case, I argued Goya rendered movement, power, and drama via a color statement.  The color statement connected the plastic, aesthetic reality to the horror of the subject.  The transformation into color converted our repulsion toward a brutal act into the order and consolation of art.  We felt horrified by what Saturn did, but we enjoyed what Goya did.

Pomegranates as a subject, therefore, can’t mean what a flayed rabbit can mean.  We react differently to a depiction of a dead animal than we do to cut fruit, and the transformation into art does not do away with that difference.  Rather, in the hands of an artist, as Dr. Barnes stated, both the intrinsic interest of the subject and the perfect coördination all the means, color, light, line, space, make up the total esthetic effect and can establish a painting as … a great achievement of plastic art no matter what the subject was and, in essence, the opposite: because of what the subject was.

How do you work with this?

Here’s the way.  Try objectivity.

Let’s first examine the Renoir painting upside down:

Make a list:

1.     Three globular volumes “float” in the shallow space of two undulating horizontal bands.

2.     Glowing color chords of ribbon-like strokes build solid volumes: the central volume opens into a crevice composed of smaller orbs, ruby-like in color and sparkle.  This “inside-out,” back and forth in space establishes the central theme.

3.     To our left, the yellow/green color volume slips behind the central one causing the central volume to levitate.  To our right, the smaller ruby-red color volume hangs in space barely touching the central one but gently vibrating next to it.

4.     The brush strokes on the globular volumes create a soft, velvety, “skin” that appears thick yet supple, and connect with other brush strokes in the background, creating a gently curving, flowing movement.

5.     In the lower brown band, darker shades of brown/red/and gray echo the roundness of the three volumes as well as move the eye back (on the left) and forward (on the right). 

6.     In the wider, upper “white” band, the horizontal color strokes of blue, pink, white, gray, and brown flow, ripple-like,  toward the center.

7.     At the top center, a series of short blue/gray strokes that say “fold” in the “cloth” connect, skewer-like, to the “peeled back skin” of the central volume in an arabesque that draws attention to its rhythmic counterpart on the bottom right where the smaller volume meets the brown background.

Renoir’s picture holds together by a tightly knit continuous interflow of color.  Solid color volumes infused with light join with the banded setting because of the interflow of their respective colors.  Compactly organized ribbons of color flow throughout the picture.

In this case, pomegranates on a table transform into a continuous sequence of arabesque-movement of line, light, color, volumes and spatial intervals varying in luminosity and definitiveness of shape.  Foreground, middle ground, and background form an integral part of the main compositional theme, the arabesque-movement of solid volumes in colored space.

Now look at the Soutine upside down:

 Make a list:

1.     In this case, when the subject’s hold diminishes, the picture facts can be perceived with less emotion: a large central twisted mass of unctuous, contorted, pulled, smeared, vigorous, forceful brushstrokes pattern the highly luminous color shapes. The central mass is set off by the two receding slightly diagonal rectilinear flattened projectors:  an irregularly shaped, crumpled “white” rectangle and a solid brown rectangle.  These two areas are surrounded on three sides by a darker brown/black.  This creates a pocket of space that “floats” the first two.

2.     The “head” of the central mass slides back in the lower center because of the darker “shadow” color to its right and left on the brown background.  Because of the darker color next to each “leg,” another “sinking” occurs at the top center

3.     The “exposed” area that makes up the “body” reveals gristly, contrasted swirls of thick, vibrant, rich layers of reds, pinks, oranges, and brown/black. 

4.     Echoes of the central mass occur in the white “cloth”: the ovoid “body” appears in the upper right as a lighter circle of white within which grays and blacks recede; the foreground “legs” are echoed to their left and right; the “white cloth” pushes away from the upper left “leg” as the upper right leg sinks into it.

5.     The brown “tabletop” equally pulses with swirls of pulled bands of color.  Less “thick,” these color bands agitate and animate its surface.

One of you argued that the Renoir painting portrays fruit, a subject that is life giving.  The Soutine blatantly displays death—a flayed rabbit—at its most gruesome—violent, bleeding and dramatic. 

Maybe.

Each of us will have an emotional response to the subject.  Accept it.  If we intend to make rabbit stew, a hunter, a butcher, or a cook will feel quite differently about the rabbit than those of us used to buying meat already cut and packaged and far removed from the slaughtering.  We will feel differently about a pomegranate than we do about a skinned rabbit when we are in the grocery store, but when we are in a museum looking at a picture, we must connect our human emotions to the plastic reality depicted.

So feeling is involved.  Fruit as a subject has been used for centuries, but it is the individual artist’s conception of fruit that matters.  Dead animals have been used as a subject for centuries as well.  Soutine, himself, used all sorts of dead animals and fish as subjects: turkeys, sides of beef, ray fish, etc.  And we respond to these differently if we feel compassion for suffering or if we feel contempt for the destruction of life.  Illustration arouses sentiment, and this is legitimate it we respond to what the artist shows us, not to what he doesn’t. 

In the Renoir and Soutine paintings, the plastic means unite what the subject was with what the work of art demands: a visual theme that unifies all the means into a coherent whole.

Think about Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring One of His Sons.  Here, Goya’s expressive illustration of an insane act of infanticide and cannibalism exaggerates the qualities that renders the subject repellent:  dark/light drama; sharp, jagged angularity; light shapes emerge from darkness, and light shapes are sucked into darkness.

No matter what feelings the subject may arouse in us, our job is to examine what we have in front of us: colors on a flat surface.  And read them. 

Remember Matisse’s words: “the [subject] is an actor.  It must act powerfully on the imagination.  It means only what [the artist] makes it mean.”

I wish all my readers a wonderful holiday season.  If you have questions or ideas for the next series of posts, just click here and send them to me.