​A profound and unexpected change has snuck up on me over the last 30 or 40 years.

I have a large and diverse personal library, with a considerable segment of art books, some of which date back to the late 60’s. In fact, my library is too large. My collection overflows a room of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, as well as shelves in my studio, in the bedroom and in the hall; and still boxes full of books sit waiting to find homes. Several weeks ago I undertook to thin out my library.

As a young man, on several occasions, I spent what was for me a considerable fortune for large books full of color prints of the paintings of Matisse, or Picasso, Modigliani, or Cezanne—to name a very few.  I cherished those books. Their contents excited me and inspired me for decades and I often found myself channeling Modigliani in the portrait of a friend, or Picasso in a nude, Matisse in an interior. Oh my how I loved those images!

And now, trimming my library, I found myself contemplating the unthinkable as I looked into my old art books.

The first shock came as I pored over one of my early favorites, Picasso’s Women, flipping through the pages expecting soon to get past these spontaneous and somewhat frivolous pictograms of woman painted onto what appear to be large pieces of industrial scrap iron. All the metal shapes have the same contour, all are painted white with black markings and, most distressing, none are particularly beautiful or exciting. They are just examples of Picasso giving Picasso permission to play with anything.

We’ve been through a lot since Picasso made those figures. They have lost their impact, possibly because today so much is permitted, and not just in the arts. And permission was, I believe, their principal message fifty years ago.

I browsed on. Pablo Picasso made some stunningly beautiful portraits of women. I long for the day I can return to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and marvel at his Woman in White. But this book contained none of those delectable images; it was all shock and permission, long ago granted and forgotten. The only one I could still enjoy was a collage and charcoal portrait of Jacqueline on the cover.

This is not to negate the significance of Picasso’s work. The permissions and abstractions he advocated are a major factor in where we are today. But the style, at least as it appears in this book, no longer moves me.

I next picked up a portfolio of Cézanne prints. Sharp disappointment. I had revered Cézanne, not only for his innovations in resuscitating pictorial depth after Impressionism, but even just for his look. Again, still recognizing his significance in the history of art, and still acknowledging that I find many of his pieces exquisite, I have to admit that the plates in this book struck me as clunky and clumsy, even to the point of suggesting that the critics of old were right, that these late 19th century artists just could not paint and were doing the best they could.

In the year I turned 19 and took a year out of college, and during the next two summers, I worked in the design studio of a large manufacturer of vending machines. I am grateful to this day of the lessons I learned at the feet of my boss, Walter Koch, even though some of the lessons were then repugnant to me. One day I presented a design to him that I felt was functional and attractive, but he sent me back to my drafting table to jazz it up and put in some rather garish embellishments. When I objected, he said, “Planned obsolescence! We want the design to be striking this year, but we want customers to get tired of it and come back for a new design next year.”

I was already aware of the concept. Every year there was great excitement over the new line of automobiles. Cars even a year old looked dated. When in the early sixties automakers flattened out the great fins of the late fifties, I wondered what they could possibly come up with next. And fashions in dress certainly went through great changes from year to year. But now, talking with Walter, I had to realize that these changes were thoroughly calculated, even to the point of the deliberate creation of an unpleasant appearance. Designers were not trying to improve on previous designs; they were looking to make something that would date itself in a very short time.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that my artist heroes of old were intentionally dating themselves, but that is what happens, and especially to the more revolutionary styles. Hence, the horns of a dilemma:

An artist can create a unique, shocking and innovative body of work. Most of us who do this will pass out of fashion eventually but who cares? We’ll be dead.

Or…
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We can choose to paint from our plain old everyday prosaic hearts. Unlike the pyrotechnic, our work will neither illuminate the entire world nor fizzle out. It will just keep good company.
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I am completely okay with being an artist whose best works are moving or exciting but not earth shakers. I believe that my paintings deserve to hang in nice homes, even if not in museums—and that’s what I really want anyway. I am a modest painter. I have permission to be a modest painter.
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Picasso says so.
 
 

​It’s one thing to say that a courageous act is one performed in the presence of fear, but that does not persuade the courageous protagonist to feel large in any way. Speaking only for myself, if I do something that others might call brave, all I know is that I did something that scared the pants off of me. The fearless might feel brave, but most likely they are just nuts.

That procrastinating blather aside, here is a brand new plein air painting that I fear is almost dumb in its simplicity. If you do find it to be dumb, I would appreciate it if you would keep that judgment to yourself, because I am feeling pretty fragile here.

I have to post this painting because I believe in it in spite of my misgivings. It is getting close to what I expect of a painting that comes from the true inside of me.

But there’s nothing there!

Of course that is not entirely true, I reassure myself. I like those colors together. I like all those crazy stripes. I like a view through a screen. I’m getting a good feeling from this little work, whether or not anyone else ever will.

And it does, dammit, show just what attracted me to the scene. I saw the texture in the bark, but I didn’t care. I saw little waves and houses across the water and pebbles in the dirt, but I didn’t care. I cared about only the stuff that shows up in the painting. To limit myself in that way is always something of a triumph for me.

But it’s so rough!

Not so rough as it once was, and after all I left it rough in order to display process. Wasn’t it I who for twenty-five painting-suppressed years exhorted math students, “Show your work! An answer all by itself is worthless!”?

Yes, it was I. And leaving this painting just like this was a conscious choice, even though I love paintings that are all finished and pretty, with the appropriate amount of detail—especially when other people paint them.

But I’m going to have to make some more of these.
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I make no claim of educational value in this post. I wrote it all just to encourage myself to be brave again. 

Nowadays people think that for a painting to be illusionistically successful it must “look like a photograph.” Actually a work of art can do much better. A drawing or painting, under the right circumstances, can convince a part of our awareness that we are actually in the presence of the real subject. A photographic image does not put us into the picture the way I am suggesting. A photorealistic painting just looks like a photo. Damn the photo for allowing us to stop there.

It has something to do with the way our brain works. I’ve seen it done and even done it myself a few times. I know it when it happens, and I know things about the circumstances, but I do not know quite why. I believe, oddly enough, that the effect is most pronounced when the two-dimensional offering is clearly not photographic. One facet or another of the painting takes on the perceptual glow of illusion—realism is too weak a word here. It seems appropriate to think of the experience as a near hallucination. 

There is a story of George Washington at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. He turned toward a full length painting by Charles Wilson Peale of two figures descending a staircase and bowed politely, before recognizing that it was a painting to which he was responding.

I believe that Washington was deceived because he saw the image out of the corner of his eye; his full power of perception was not in play. The examples in my own work that put me into the scene, so to speak, are also more suggestions than full disclosure. And the work seems to have a stronger effect in person than a copy on the monitor.

This first happened to me long ago with one of my own ink line drawings. It was a simple rendering of a woman, but one of the eyes had needed correction, so I had overworked it a bit. Upon contemplating that drawing some time later, that eye took on a life, most convincingly. I will post that drawing one of these days.

My example for this post is a little green pasture-scape. The brushstrokes are unsophisticated, the edges are unsoftened, there is scant detail; and yet there is something that causes us to feel that slope retreating from us, then swinging around to settle under the big tree. What is that? I will take credit for the greens working, and for the composition that draws you in and around, but if you are getting that something extra, the little hallucination of actual depth, then you can take credit for conjuring that inside your own head. (If you are not getting the effect, maybe you need to take this little picture home with you.)

I do not aspire to trompe l’oeil as a genre. What fascinates me is not the possibility of fooling the eye—I know that can be done fairly easily with flat subjects—but of showing perception to itself. The viewer recognizes a painted surface for what it is, and yet at the same time is compelled to perceive something beyond the work.

I believe that this bit of magic has been part of the human experience for a long time. I am convinced it was a factor in the cave paintings. And I am not the only artist who feels that the sketches he brings home from a trip are a more evocative record of his travels than hundreds of photographs. Perceptual enchantment has not been, for a very long time, the primary objective in the creation of artistic images, and I do not believe it should be. But it is fascinating, and there is likely something that happens inside of us in the presence of any depictive work—why else does representational art continue to interest us in spite of the strident politics of non-objective art throughout the last century?

We can’t all be stupid…can we?

I would like to continue thinking about this. (Illusionism. I already know how stupid we are.)