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George Rhys Artist

​In Pursuit of the Sublime

12/24/2018

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PictureCrystal Bridges Museum of Art
At the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas I overheard a professor assign his class to order works of art as picturesque, beautiful, or sublime. That's all I heard, but I think I understand what he meant. It would be interesting to know if he had previously defined those terms for his class or if he was just then assigning his students to define them for themselves.
PictureThe Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I grew up in its halls.
Here are my definitions:
 
The picturesque is the image that entertains us. It might be a nostalgic village scene, a depiction of family life, or the unusual. If a camera were available, a photograph could convey the same meaning.
 
The beautiful in art attracts us, and often thrills us. Even the ugly can be the basis of a beautiful painting, because the construction of the work itself inspires the aesthetic response. If it is the subject matter that is beautiful, as in a gorgeous sunset or flower, I would classify the piece as picturesque.
PicturePablo Picasso, Still Life with Pitcher, Candle and Enamel Pot, 1945
But the sublime—the sublime elevates us, stimulates us to transcend our accustomed perception of the world. In the presence of the sublime we are deeply moved, we are changed for the better, forever. To be sublime a painting doesn't have to depict heaven; the subject can be quite mundane, but we will look at art and life in a new way.
 
Impressionism was a sublime movement. Those guys woke us up to subtle color everywhere. And consider Cezanne’s delicate parallel strokes, Ellsworth Kelly’s great slabs of pure single colors, Egon Schiele’s ragged figures, Wayne Thiebaud’s desserts: doesn’t each of these lift us out of the mundane?
 
Shortly after my eavesdropping experience in the Crystal Bridges Museum I found myself classifying art into three new categories, according to our responses.
 
First is the pretty. Pretty pictures are highly valued thanks to a plethora of bright colors and graceful lines.
 
The second in this classification is the impressive. The viewer is impressed by detail, by photographic realism, or by an unexpected point of view. It might stimulate the artist to envy but not necessarily to emulate.
PictureInside the Guggenheim
The third response a work of art might engender is excitement. This level of emotion is more intense than the charm of the pretty, more uplifting than envy. Sometimes the elation is almost too intense to bear, and I find myself not knowing how to contain it. Picasso has done that to me many times, as has Matisse. I almost lost it fifty years ago being introduced to Klimt’s landscapes in the Guggenheim Museum in New York as a kindly lady smiled at the young man near tears.
​
Does my classification match the professor’s? I don’t think it quite does, though their ranking in terms of quality might.​
PictureThe Museum of Modern Art in New York. This photo brings back the feelings of excitement I once enjoyed there, though hordes of tourists with phone cameras have ruined it.
A picturesque or a pretty painting will turn my head, but it doesn’t feed me, if that makes sense. As for beautiful and impressive creations, both are moving, though not in the same way. But sublime works, exciting works—as I mean exciting—cause the Earth to move, and maybe for the same reasons.
 
I believe that a work of art can embody all of these qualities, and I am not ashamed of my pretty or my picturesque pieces. I am pleased when a painting turns out to be beautiful. I don’t know if my creations are ever impressive, but that is not for me to judge. I do strive to produce exciting and sublime works of art. I may not have succeeded in this aim, but I'm working on it. If my work fails to be pretty or impressive it is because I have my sights set on the uplifting.
 
It’s hard to imagine how one could find one’s own work sublime, and when I am excited by my own work it is usually because of an unexpected success.
 
The best we may expect of ourselves is to be as authentic and vulnerable as we can manage and leave the evaluation to others whose opinion we respect.
​​
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Sandcastling

12/22/2018

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PictureLast Day on the Suwannee, one of the first secret paintings
Roberta Murray asked the question, “What would I paint if I knew nobody was going to see it?” I thought this was an excellent question because it suggested an approach to the question “Who am I? What am I trying to do? Why am I painting?”
 
I was stimulated to enact that very circumstance. I kept all my paintings secret for quite a while, and avoided critiques and comments. I did see my work going in a particular direction, and eventually had the focus to let my productions go public again.
 
But we always evolve. We peel another skin off the onion and discover that our concerns are still more basic, still more central.
 
I find no convincing reason for why we paint. There are causes, but not reasons.
 
Human beings are driven to control their environment. There is no explanation for this; it's just the way humans are put together. Visual artists seek to provide stuff to look at, even if only for themselves. Freud was wrong when he said that artists are primarily seeking fame and sexual conquests. It is true that we wish for that and it may be a factor in any field of endeavor, but art is motivated by the drive to make art.
PictureEd's Driveway, painted a couple of years ago but only very recently displayed
However, it is difficult, if not impossible, for an adult to undertake the making of art and ignore considerations of acceptance. We crave the praise of others, especially if it is necessary for us to sell our works to make a living. That’s a primal urge as well, but making art for money or applause corrupts and distorts that underlying drive to "make marks."
 
There is a type of human being that is able to make art free of the craving for riches and fame. An innocent child young enough to have never been burdened with concerns for worldly success will exhibit instinctive action in its purest form. Picture a toddler playing with blocks. Before the pursuit of praise distorts her* motivations, she happily puts blocks together with no concern but her own actions and her enjoyment of them.
 
Children at the beach make sandcastles with no expectation of praise, sex, or money.
 
An artist who puts on the mantle of the young child and imagines herself “building sandcastles” as she paints relinquishes the side benefits of her actions. She taps the well of pure creativity.
 
It is in this frame of mind that I create the works in the Sandcastle Series. I make no claim for their excellence or even competence. Those considerations are irrelevant. I am doing nothing more sophisticated than following my primitive artistic impulses.
PictureDrawing Materials on a Chair, recently created, recently shared online

​I do not consider this practice to represent fully evolved art-making. Experience, virtuosity and knowledge must play a part in a completed work of art, but I have come to believe that frequent experiences and insights provided by “sandcastling” are an essential part of an artistic career.
 
I am publishing the Sandcastle works not because they are delightful, but as a consequence of my commitment to them. It is not necessary for anyone to like them to satisfy me. Just as a child will build a sandcastle on the beach oblivious to adults and other children walking by, I am in a state of disengagement with the public world of art as I create these works and allow others to see them. If they are beautiful or charming, I am happy for it but that is not my intent.
 
If you as viewer enjoy seeing another person working and having a good time, that's all that I can reasonably expect.
*A repost of a footnote in June 2016
​My solution to the indeterminate gender pronoun controversy is to default to the feminine. This is to signify that I have always viewed the use of “he” as implying nothing about gender politics, and choose now to view “she” in the same way. Since it does matter to some people, the truly even-minded writer should have no problem accommodating them. Those who cannot let go of the masculine bias really have no justification for it.
I find that the sprinkling of both gendered pronouns, supposedly equally throughout, shouts endorsement of gender politics—and what good does that do? In the same vein, I deplore the use of x, as in xe for s/he or any other solution that does not just graciously acknowledge that 2500 years of male dominance of pronouns is enough, and if we really believe it didn’t matter, it still shouldn’t.
You know what would be a truly lovely, loving solution? What if male writers used “she” exclusively and female writers used “he”?
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​A Brief and Embarrassing Autobiography, Or, Don’t Denigrate Art School

12/13/2018

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A surprising number of art school graduates I speak to say that art school was a waste of time, that art schools concentrate on self-expression and do not teach technique. Then I make my point, then they think about it, then they agree with me. Before I state that point, let me tell you a little about my own biography vis a vis art school.

We (my sister and I) called our mother’s father “Granddaddy” because he was so kind and dear. We called our father’s father “Grandfather” because he was formal and distant. From my early age Granddaddy enjoyed my artistic efforts, and often bought my drawings for a quarter. Grandfather fancied himself something of an artist. Many of his, and hence my, ancestors were professional artists, and though today I see his efforts as quite amateurish, his drawings then were nothing short of miraculous. He drew often, for the sheer pleasure of it. I loved to ask him to draw a ship or a horse, and he obliged. It was at those moments that I felt close to him. I still have a painting he made of a train emerging from a tunnel that he gave me for my fourth birthday. When I was nine Grandfather gave me my first set of pastels.

Art has been a prevalent interest of both sides of my family. It is no wonder, then, that by the age of five I knew I wanted to be an artist.

When I was seven my widowed father remarried. My stepmother was the niece of a prominent illustrator and fine artist, Frank E. Schoonover who, as a young man at the opening of the twentieth century, had traveled this country painting Indians and plein air landscapes.

I was eleven when Phoebe introduced me to oil painting. She was not a painter, but she knew about palette knives and linseed oil and how you needed a big tube of white. Within a year I was ready to go further and asked for lessons.

“You need to develop a style before you get lessons,” she told me, and my family dynamic being what it was I did not know or think to ask again. I never met my step-uncle or had a conversation with anyone who knew about art.

I limped along through the school years. My “talent” was recognized by peers and teachers but never really encouraged until the kind mother of a classmate saw my work and said, “You missed your calling!” Halfway through college my calling suddenly yanked me into a state of great anxiety and out of Princeton, where there was no studio art program beyond a couple of pass-fail electives. I went home and painted and painted and asked to transfer to art school.

“You will go back to Princeton or I will find another young man and send him instead.” Times being what they were, my choice was between Vietnam or Princeton and I chose Princeton.

The rest of my story is a tedious string of attempts to support myself and a family through artistic pursuits while sinking deeper and deeper into a quicksand of menial jobs that, while I attempted to save out time to paint, sapped my energy and spirit, until finally, after twenty years, I accepted that I could not ever hope to produce art for a living without a lot of help, and took on a profession that demanded every bit of everything I had—except art—and I made the most of it. I don't regret my teaching career. In fact I am very grateful for it. But it was not art.

So here is the point I tell art school graduates who complain that they did not learn technique. When you go to art school you spend four years in a milieu which validates the preeminent importance of art in your life.  You must not underestimate the value of that steady confirmation of your aspiration. Most all art school alumni concede this issue.

(By the way, a recent study, which I regretfully cannot find to cite, found that the majority of art school grads are happy and successful, in stark repudiation of the commonly accepted nonsense that art school is a dead end.)


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​Art is Magic

12/9/2018

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Many of the earliest surviving paintings of animals are pockmarked, theoretically by spears. Anthropologists suggest that the spear throwers’ intent was target practice. I do not believe it. A stump or a mark of any kind on a wall would suffice as a target. I believe that the spear throwers were participating in the magic of perception. For evidence I offer the outline of a hand that often appears by a depiction of animals, I remind you of the fear primitive people have that cameras will entrap their souls, and I point to your experience and my experience.
Picture
Faye's World, detail. Acrylic on canvas
Imagine the effect on the first connoisseurs of the painted representation. In a way a picture was unlike anything they had ever seen before, yet in a way it was not. Seeing a person create an image on a cave wall was unprecedented, and must have amazed the more contemplative members of the clan. 
Very likely the artist also was amazed that such an accomplishment was possible, knowing that what had been no more than juices and bodily fluids now appeared as an antelope, and so promptly celebrated the transubstantiation with an imprint of his agent, the hand. (Many artists even today marvel that their own efforts take on a life of their own. I know I do.)
PictureDrawing of a Nude, detail
And yet this was not an entirely unfamiliar experience. Just as do you and I, early man surely recognized faces and animals in clouds and tree trunks and distant rock formations. Human history is rife with such representations, where a person might say, knowing she is looking at a cloud, that a formation in the sky looks like a dragon or a cow. And there are numerous cases of deliberate and total identification of object and image: Voodoo dolls, icons, idols, and constellations are treated as actual persons. The Muslim rejection of all imagery stems from the refusal to allow such creation, leaving that work to Allah alone.

It is pleasurable to gaze upon a distant view or an attractive person; but the pleasure of viewing a painting of a view or a person is different and, for some of us, actually more powerful. It is pleasurable to us to knowingly perceive paint and object at the same time. Watch a spectator approach a very realistic painting, closer and closer, squinting now.  Is it a painting, or is it a photograph? Ah, now, when she detects the hand of the artist betrayed by the slightest wavering, it’s a painting! And she is pleased, more than she would be pleased by a photo.

Any magician will tell you, the magic is in your head. The magician suggests the illusion, but the magic is inside you.
 
A century and a half ago photography robbed painting of its position. The only flat representations had been paintings. Except for the occasional misapprehension of an image as the real thing, paintings were always identifiable as paintings, the more realistic the better. The photograph was too perfect, too easy, too immediate for painting to compete and it went through a crisis. Much of its role—and its business—was taken over by photography. Every major art movement of the late nineteenth and the entire twentieth century can be interpreted as a reaction against photography. Painters were seeking to create something that a camera could not, and abandoning tasks that the camera could perform. Many even disavowed painting’s original mandate:  to create identifiable images.

An artist friend recently claimed that we do magic when we render a three dimensional scene into two dimensions. I disagree. The eye itself mindlessly performs this task by projecting an image from the light received through the lens onto the retina, a surface which mathematicians call S2, meaning the surface of a sphere that behaves like two dimensions when you work with just a small portion of it. In the case of rendering three dimensions, there is magic; but this magic occurs in the visual cortex, where two slightly different images are integrated into the very convincing perception of depth.
PictureDrawing of a Nude; graphite, lumber crayon, conte crayon on paper, 18 x 24
But the magic of which I speak occurs when the merest squiggle on a paper is perceived simultaneously as a squiggle and as a face, looking in a specific direction with a specific expression. It is not magic if the image on the paper is indistinguishable from an image on the retina, as in photography and photo-realism. It is not magic if the squiggle appears only as a squiggle, as in non-representational art and most doodles.

Representational art lives in the perceptual space between daubs of color and recognizable image. The width of that space varies—it is wide for Picasso and narrow for Wyeth—but just the same art loses its magic outside that no-man’s land.
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How is an Artist like a Cobbler?

12/6/2018

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Nora Jones tells of a chain of events that led to the great success of her first album—success that was neither sought nor expected. Concerned for Nora’s safety, her mother gave her a large Cadillac, which enabled her to chauffer a group of musicians, the association with whom led to a series of connections and experiences resulting in that big first album. This does not denigrate the achievement of Nora Jones in any way, but think about the hundreds of beautiful young musicians who yearn only to perform in a modest venue who will never rise to or continue at that level, for the lack of kismet.
Picture
Took Off my Hiking Shoes for a Rest, acrylic on masonite, 18 x 49"
Mark Twain wrote of General Ulysses S. Grant’s arrival in Heaven, where he saw a shoe cobbler from New Hampshire celebrated as the best general ever. “But wait,” objected Grant, “He is only a cobbler!”

“True,” came the reply. “Because he never had the opportunity to lead an army.”

And what assurance have we that Grant was even the second best general?

Jones and Grant are only two of many stars who owe some of their good fortune to circumstances unrelated to their artistic efforts.

Vincent Van Gogh, without the support of his brother Theo, could never have continued painting and developing beyond his own crude beginnings; and without the good business connections of Theo’s widow’s art dealership he would never have become worshipped worldwide after his death. I wonder how many thousands of struggling 19th century European artists had the drive and ability of young Vincent, but never made it out of invisible mediocrity.
As for me, I was able to work at my art determinedly but intermittently, while making increasing concessions to financial reality. Circumstance and lack of support kept me out of serious painting for fifty years. Retirement has broken that impasse, but I am no longer at the cobbler stage at which a lucky break would do me any good. I know there are tens of thousands like me.
Picture
Sun Shines Through the Window into my Bathtub, oil on masonite, 32 x 48"
I have two strong feelings that arise out of these circumstances.

First, when I see a brand new novice painter expecting immediate income, I feel sad. Her painting needs a decade or more of work, and without support and mentorship her chances are even skimpier.

Second, I am annoyed when a rich guy says that a poor guy is having money trouble because he made bad choices and didn’t work hard enough. There are millions of people working very hard but who have no pathway to affluence, and it is an outrageous insult to them to suggest that they are to blame for their own insufficiency. Many a successful actor, writer or painter—or business executive—takes all the credit for his position and cannot acknowledge any of the contributions that helped put him there. Yes it takes hard work and persistence, but that is still no guarantee of turning a profit—or breaking even.

There are always exceptions. There have been artists who struck pay dirt immediately, without the requisite years of sticking to it and working hard. Their experience is rare. To lead brand new painters to believe that they can have the same success if they just follow the same formula is heartless.

Judging from the magazines addressed to striving artists, from the chains of art supply retailers, and the plethora of workshops offered, there are thousands upon thousands of American artists who take their artwork seriously, have reached a level of respectable competence, and hope that with just a little bit more work or knowledge or recognition they will achieve solvency. But the association of art and income is not promised. (The marketing of art supplies and income is a much better bet.)
Picture
This was a pleasant day, A Lakeside Grove, acrylic on canvas panel, 12 x 16
To those artists I want to say it is time to paint, just paint. I love spending time with you, painting next to you, discussing art and appreciating each other’s work. Let’s be brave and not worry about sales or prizes because those have nothing to do with what is on our easels. Our expectations are modest and our prices are modest. What I hope for is just enough validation to feel visible, and to distribute enough of my paintings to the world so that I can make my way through my studio.
To those non-artists whom I hope might read this blog I want to suggest hanging the work of a competent artist on a wall or two. Consider replacing prints of century old, tired art with vibrant, live art. Avoid the banal or simply decorative and go for something that excites and challenges you a bit. Read art history now and then to develop your understanding and appreciation. You will enjoy the enrichment live art will provide you, as you visit it now and again with your gaze. It is better than flipping through a book or walking through a museum.

Eventually your knowledge and taste will evolve and you may find that your painting no longer satisfies you. Not a problem. Replace it with a more advanced (by your standards) work and give the old one to a friend. (You give plenty of other old things away, don't you?) Explain to the friend what you liked about that painting and point out your favorite passages. 

We all need the population of aesthetic connoisseurs to increase!
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The Right Question

12/6/2018

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​If an artist follows her authentic voice, then she is certain to generate an unexpected effect or two—unexpected certainly by others, but often even by herself. We can observe that feature and conclude that the artist is incompetent and that she did not know what she was doing, because we know what works and we know that she did not follow the rules. Or we can ask the question, of her or of ourselves, “Why did she do that?” I think this is the most important question that we can ask of an artist because it acknowledges the artist’s control over and responsibility for her work. And it indicates our own interest and involvement.
Art school juries follow an almost indistinguishable practice, but with this one most important distinction: the art school jury is too often seeking to fault the student, who is expected to accept the question as a correctly negative judgment or to come up with a good story. This is called defending the piece. Need I say more? I advocate asking the question as a means of greater understanding.
Picture
Dry Canoes. Is there anything unexpected or disturbing here? What question might you ask about this painting? Can you imagine a satisfactory answer?
Art criticism is rife with examples of superior critics accepting the shortcomings of artists as manifestations of their charm rather than unnoticed sophistication.
 
Poor Vincent! Today he is loved and admired by unthinking romantics. It is popular to believe that he painted the way that he did because he was such a beautiful character and that he could not really help himself. Those sinuous parallel brush strokes appear to have been made by a man who could not figure out what else to do, but at least he had gorgeous colors and curvilinear shapes. It doesn't occur to us to ask on any meaningful level, “What, Vincent, were you trying to do? Why did you paint that way?”

Do you suppose viewer comments bothered Van Gogh, especially from those who had no idea what he was really doing?
Picture
The Yellow Painter. This painting was faulted for the post being represented in correct perspective. How might you have answered a question about that?
Van Gogh and many other painters of his time were students of The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and their Applications to the Arts (1839) by the famed French chemist M.E. Chevreul. Chevreul had blended colors by winding threads across a card in alternating hues. He discovered that when similar colors are alternated in this way, a brilliance resulted that could not be achieved by either of the colors alone.
 
Vincent's intention, then, was to sacrifice a solid color or a smoothly gradated color for a more brilliant effect by alternating two similar colors.
 
By assuming that Vincent did not know any better, we have failed to learn of a major component of his mission.
 
When we walk into a museum and are faced with a large canvas painted with a single bright color we may react to the work of Ellsworth Kelly by assuming that he was just another minimalist, or that he was reacting against representational art or traditional art in some petulant way. But Ellsworth Kelly was one of a group of soldiers who, in World War II, created highly representational mock-ups of tanks, airplanes, and other military equipment in order to fool German aerial reconnaissance. His drawings of flowers are gorgeous, he was certainly capable of making thoroughly convincing representational art.
 
We may not be able to completely understand the relationship between his military career and his artistic career, but knowing just that simple fact about Kelly adds another dimension to the question of his later choice to reject illusionalism. He was far from inept at it. I do not want to oversimplify and suggest that Kelly was merely reacting against the war. He was operating on a much higher level of competence and sophistication in his artistic decisions than simple knee-jerk reaction.
 
Regarding my own work I hope to hear not the vaguely judgmental comment, “That shouldn't work but strangely it does,” but instead the question, “Why did you do that?” to which I would hope to respond with an enlightened response. I, like most other artists, am not to be defined by my incompetencies.
​
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A View from the Breast

12/2/2018

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​There was a bit performed on Saturday Night Live years ago in which Earthmen arrived on a distant planet populated by well-endowed women whose eyeballs were on the tips of their breasts. The well-behaved men addressed the women’s heads when one of the ladies scolded, “Hey! Our eyes are down here, Buster!”

I believe we have been trained to look politely at art with our eyes instead of our breasts, and here I refer to the heart, not the mammary.
Picture
Painted by the eye, not from the heart. Sorry about the slanted photo; I don't have this painting any more and can't straighten this image without cutting off even more.
I remember being frustrated in art history classes because they dealt in historical facts and stylistic features without getting to feelings, let alone line and color. 

There are two categories of art discussion: one regards content and the other mechanics. Content is the stuff that the work of art is about--its subject matter and issues related thereto. Mechanics, for want of a better word, refers to the artist's technique in utilizing line, color and composition, etc.--the elements of art.

Content can elicit feelings by telling a story--Norman Rockwell comes to mind, as does Sorolla--or by placing the viewer into a scene like one of Andrew Wyeth's interiors.
But what can send my joy skyrocketing are the connections I feel with artists through their mechanics, their process.

When Picasso's Guernica was in the Museum of Modern Art in New York I used to go and sit in front of it almost every weekend, ready to feel something and failing. I had been taught to value it for its content but I couldn't relate. His Woman in White (at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will not allow me to copy the image here) however, rendered me ecstatic, not least of all because he had returned to it after it had dried and wiped a white scumble over it with a rag, perfecting it and leaving a record of that last step.  You can't really see that in a print; as with most art, you just don't see it fully unless you stand in front of it.

Matisse's scrubbed-in thin paint, Van Gogh's delicate laying in of one more brushstroke of thick paint, Thiebaud's long fluid strokes following the shape of a piece of cake: these allow us to sense the artist's hand, and that is exciting!
Too often I forget myself and get a little too literal, a little too tight for my own taste. There are hundreds of artists more illusionistic (realistic) than I, and I do enjoy their work, but for my own work I prefer a wider gap between illusion and awareness of process. When a painting gets too cautious many viewers are happier, but I am less so. When someone asks why I don't like one of my own works as much as they do, I'm not going to talk my own work down; I just say, "It's not quite what I was going for."

When someone likes my work for the "right" reasons I am abundantly grateful, and I wish there were many more of you.
Picture
The charm of this watercolor lies in its ability to place the viewer into the scene.
Hey! Look from down here, Buster!
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Awkward

12/2/2018

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When Esteban Vicente chastised my drawing as "too facile," he might have been right but he neglected to mention a very important subtext. My drawing was too facile—to allow my struggle to show, my feelings to show, my process to show.
 
Fifty-five years later, I am more than willing to let all of that show.
Picture
The only aspect of process that I allowed to show in those early outline drawings was that I was drawing a continuous sinuous line. Nowadays I prefer to draw with a tool that is much too fat or floppy: an unsharpened woodless pencil, a lumber crayon, a brush. When I want to draw a thinner, more accurate line, I must use a corner of the tip of my utensil, which gives a fine enough line, but with very little accuracy.
 
What's in it for me is that it makes the whole process a lot more challenging, and therefore a lot more fun. What I imagine is the advantage to you, the viewer, is that your neurons mirror the actions of the strokes that are visible in my drawing. It is an empathic reaction that we all have, that lies behind our fascination with sports, dance, live music and other performances. In the case of my drawings, if you are willing to spend the time perusing them, you draw with me!
 
Hopefully, then, you experience with me a bit of my joy. That's very difficult on a computer screen, because you can’t see the surface on which my hand and instrument were acting.
 
Live art is so very important. You may not be thinking about mirror neurons, neither when you are watching athletic performances nor when you are contemplating a painting, but if you spend the time in front of an original piece of art, you are very likely to feel that excitement.
And folks, it is not virtuosity that excites us that way. There are plenty of highly accomplished producers of boredom. 

It's our connection!
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