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George Rhys Artist

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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The Demise of Talent

9/4/2018

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I am a little dumbfounded, and I admit that’s not very nice of me, when someone praises my talent. This is not talent. 

This is struggle. This is my heart. My drawings are not pretty, they are not graceful, they are not sensual. My drawings are more wrinkled than my face. You can read despair and resolve in these drawings as I fight back to gain control, to force the curves and lines into some semblance of grace.

There are four layers here, displaying plenty of struggle in the first three renditions (graphite, crayon and conte); and then I decided I could not tolerate that foot running off the page and started all over again in ink.
Picture
I remember being able to draw a figure in a somewhat complicated pose with a single line. I drew those curves smoothly and steadily, intuiting the point of the pen to invade imaginary space behind the paper, in conformance with the shape of the figure I saw before me. That was more talent than grit, because it was easy. 

Princeton had no studio arts program, just a couple of semesters of pass/fail drawing, painting, and sculpture. I took them all. The year I took pass-fail drawing Esteban Vicente was the artist in residence. I saw his disapproval as he looked at my drawing but could not understand because it looked okay to me. “Too facile,” he said.
Picture
"Too facile." 1965 Time is hard on newsprint, too.
Picture
I was 24 when I made this drawing, not well practiced at all.
Last night I read something frightful. It was not new to me, but this time I realized just how personal it is. Our brain shucks off neurons that we are not using. They shut down, and then they disappear.

You can read elsewhere how I had to abandon my art for decades. That sense of penetrating my drawing surface has left me. I remember how it feels very clearly, and I am well aware of its absence today.


Drawing these figures now is a strenuous undertaking. After three hours I am quite tired. Up until right now, all of the figure drawings I have posted on Instagram, Facebook and this web page are of Lena, who posed for me over the last two years. Every week we worked together for five hours with an hour out for lunch together, and it's a good thing, because I really needed the break. I used to refer to Lena as “The Mean Girl,” because when she was here I suffered so. Of course she's not mean at all; she's very dear. (Please take a look at The Lena Series; there's a button above.)
Picture
Lena Reclining and Twisting, graphite, cropped from 18 x 24"
Today's drawings are possible because although I have lost my facility, the drive and the urgency are still there--and two extra lifetimes of wisdom. They have a lot more to say than my early work, as you can imagine. I see in them the hard struggle, the loss, the despair and the blunt determination. To me this work is far more expressive than a smooth and graceful drawing could ever be—not that there was ever anything wrong with them. I did love them.

It was a traumatic loss to let my facility die on the vine. Please do not dismiss these drawings as clumsy, indecisive, error-ridden fumblings. They are meta-expressionistic; they express the struggle and determination of their very own creation, which is why I let all the revisions show. Though they are less popular, they represent my strongest, most human work.

And I hope that bastard Vicente is happy.
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On Outlines

8/31/2018

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Picture
Seated Nude, Hand on Head; life drawing, black ink over graphite contour on acid free white drawing paper, 24 x 18. For $90 total I will send this drawing to anywhere in the contiguous 48
We humans are almost unique in the animal kingdom in our ability to recognize an object of the world in a two-dimensional image. It is remarkable enough that we can do this with a color photograph. Stretching this capacity to its greatest extreme, we are capable of seeing a simple outline as a solid form, and that just outright fascinates me.

It is so easy for us to “see” a solid form in a line drawing that we don't recognize this miracle of brain power; but on some level the brain recognizes its own achievement and celebrates it. That is why we enjoy simple outlines as much as we do. We see that preference everywhere, from animated cartoons to paintings that feature lines which are not completely necessary, as in the paintings of Botticelli, Picasso, Cezanne, Van Gogh and hundreds more.
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​I Paint Wrong

1/1/2018

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I like to quip, “I paint wrong,” but I am disappointed by the response I get, which is often something along the lines of, “You just need to paint more.”

That may be true. I will never have painted enough. But insufficient time spent painting is not why I say I paint wrong.
Picture
Big White House in the Woods, Acrylic 18 x 24. I said, "I'm done." Vie said, "You're not done!" I said, "Yes I am. This feels more like me than I have painted in a long time."
I paint wrong because I do not paint to try to please the casual purveyor of art galleries, or tourists, or locals, or judges or the people who say I need to paint more. I should add that I hate it when I all too often fall into trying to paint right.

There are a lot of boring paintings out there that are painted right.

But there are paintings out there that just excite the bejesus out of me. I cannot overstate my overwhelming resonance with those paintings, most of which are in museums and some of which show up in art magazines and online. At those times I wish there was someone next to me to whom I could express my exhilaration. You see, those guys painted wrong, too.
​
I feel a great kinship with those guys, though I know I do not yet have the courage to paint as wrong as they did.
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In Pursuit of the Unselfconsciously Profound

12/31/2017

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Not so long ago there were a good number of paintings I had been talking myself out of making. Why? Not sure, but it may be because at some level I had bought into the notion that I must not do what I want to do. Anyway, there are still several such paintings in limbo.
Picture
Lunch Break, Acrylic 18 x 24
Because as a young man I had more than twice allowed myself to be persuaded by self-appointed superior artists to completely change my direction, and even now still find myself susceptible to the least comment, positive or negative, I  found it helpful to work in seclusion. This made it really easy to work on anything, because nobody was ever going to see it—not for a while, anyway. 

I credit Roberta Murray with setting me off in this direction by posing the question, "How would I paint if nobody was going to see my work?" 

The new strategy worked well. I found it much easier to start paintings and to work them in a manner which would have been unfathomable in the past. It was not a perfect solution; I did still have to encourage myself in order to get started, but I managed to execute a handful of paintings that turned out to have higher meaning for me. My excitement in painting those harked back to the old days when painting was new and not yet fraught with the threat of put-downs.

Often enough my paintings reached a level above any I had attained before. The difference between these works and those previous is not earth-shattering at all; it may be barely visible to most people. To me the evolution was profound.
And yet still a negative voice inside me suggested, “These aren’t so great. They are not groundbreaking at all. You could see work of this stature in a magazine illustration.”
That may be true, I admit, and there have been some pretty good magazine illustrations. But so what? I was improving. And you could say of a heck of a lot of good paintings that they would make good magazine illustrations.

Sometimes some of my own paintings intimidated me. At those moments I had no better ideas in the pipeline. Fearing that I would not reach that level again for a while (though I did believe I would eventually) made it almost impossible to start a new painting. And if a painter or critic said to me, “Just do it anyway,” I didn’t need to hear that.

​I do not accept much of the nonsense spouted these days about how people should paint—but that’s for another blog entry.

It took a long time and a great deal of self-persuasion to undertake each next painting. I was sort of happy when I managed to do so, and new paintings were finished and sitting for my personal viewing in the studio. Sort of happy because, no, this was not the romantic ending (and I knew it would not be) of the 
Picture
Illuminati, Acrylic 24 x 18
painter discovering that his new undertaking was outrageously successful, despite his pessimism. I believed of each painting that it was not my very best, and it usually wasn't. Though among my best, it did not yet have the conception or meaning to which I aspired. But okay.

​In one very important respect, however, each painting was a great success, because I did it. I overpowered my negative concerns and decided to paint it just to see what each one would look like.  That made the next one easier to take up.
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​Taxonomic* Adventures in Learning

12/17/2017

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Picture
The Bath House; acrylic 12 x 16.
I have decided not to continue my series of articles on color.

I spent twenty-five years teaching mathematics to a wide spectrum of ages and abilities, gave my heart and guts to it, and lived with the awareness that I was the oddball for seeing the beauty in it. A significant ratio of students resists learning about an analytic subject—hell, many students resist learning anything at all—and there is nothing inside me that desires to push anyone into such a pursuit.

When people find out I worked as a teacher and ask what subject, I reflexively wince inside when I tell them it was math because the common response to that is how they hated math and how it was their worst subject. Some of that hatred, you know, leaks onto the teacher.

So maybe I am a little phobic about getting myself into a reminiscent situation. The next bit in the color discussion is quite analytical and a lot of work for me.

Recently I carelessly blurted out in company, when asked, that I knew enough about perspective to volunteer a workshop (though I don’t really want to). The second person to respond made her negative feelings about such a study very plain. And there was no third response. I had long ago abandoned any intention of continuing discussing color; that exchange regarding perspective is what has motivated me to write this little posting.

But before I go I just want to say this: there is no synthesis without analysis.

Picture

*Bloom’s cognitive domain (knowledge-based) adapted from Wikipedia:

Remembering involves recognizing or remembering facts, terms, basic concepts, or answers without necessarily understanding what they mean. Its characteristics may include:
·         Knowledge of specifics—terminology, specific facts
·      Knowledge of ways and means of dealing with specifics—conventions, trends and sequences, classifications and categories, criteria, methodology
·         Knowledge of the universals and abstractions in a field—principles and generalizations, theories and structures
Example: Name five types of composition.

Comprehending 
involves demonstrating understanding of facts and ideas by organizing, comparing, translating, interpreting, giving descriptions, and stating the main ideas.
Example: Identify the type of composition Da Vinci utilizes in Madonna of the Rocks. How does this composition contribute to the meaning of this work?

Applying
 involves using acquired knowledge—solving problems in new situations by applying acquired knowledge, facts, techniques and rules. Learners should be able to use prior knowledge to solve problems, identify connections and relationships and how they apply in new situations.
Example: Sketch a diagram of a street scene using a composition that implies activity.

Analyzing
 involves examining and breaking information into component parts, determining how the parts relate to one another, identifying motives or causes, making inferences, and finding evidence to support generalizations. Its characteristics include:
·         Analysis of elements
·         Analysis of relationships
·         Analysis of organization
Example: Carefully analyze the compositional elements of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, making specific reference to objects depicted in the painting to support your claims. 

Synthesizing
 involves building a structure or pattern from diverse elements; it also refers to the act of putting parts together to form a whole. Its characteristics include:
·         Production of a unique communication
·         Production of a plan, or proposed set of operations
·         Derivation of a set of abstract relations
Example: Create a painting whose composition combines three or more complicated shapes and that implies the quiet before the storm.

Evaluating
 involves presenting and defending opinions by making judgments about information, the validity of ideas, or quality of work based on a set of criteria. Its characteristics include:
·         Judgments in terms of internal evidence
·         Judgments in terms of external criteria
Example: Look back over your paintings from the last three months. Which are the most engaging by virtue of their compositions? Why?
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You Had to Be There

8/5/2017

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Picture
Just to show you where I was. This photo doesn't come close to my experience.
One morning last week, while I was contemplating from my campsite a view across the lake in Tombigbee State Park, Mississippi, I remembered again the assignment I had overheard a professor give his class at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Arkansas two years ago. He charged his students to classify paintings as beautiful, picturesque, or sublime. That classification of images crosses my mind frequently, and I have revised it to make it more practical for the artist—me.
 
Some scenes are just as well represented by a photograph as by any other medium. These are the picturesque. When the point of the image is to present something interesting or unusual, I feel I might as well snap a photo as paint it.
 
Other views inspire me to represent them through my eyes, my head, my heart and my hands. The image that appears on the canvas will be abstracted from what I observe—a photograph will not do. My purpose as the go-between between scene and painting is to allow the image to pass through me and be influenced by its passage, from a starting point that might well be unremarkable. These sorts of paintings are the rare ones that satisfy me most, whether done by me or others.
 
But then there are vistas that are just outright stunning. It was such a panorama by which I was moved that morning at my campsite, and that morning I went one step further in my thought about the tripartite classification of images.
 
We artists believe, and we like to tell others, that we see ever so much more of a view when we render it in paint. But is that necessarily true? I looked hard at the colors in the trees across the water, noting the change in hue and value between the leaves above and the dark forest interior below. There now, wasn’t I seeing just as much as I would if I were painting? Of course I was. The only varying factor was my level of attention. Usually in the presence of beauty I just look and enjoy. I don’t resolve to see as intently as I would if I were painting—but I could. I can.
 
Then I realized that I desire of my viewers that they see deeply into my work, that they spend effort to see what I have put together. But wait! Didn’t we all at one time agree that the most thorough seeing came only with painting? So should the viewer paint a copy of our paintings? Some instructors do require of students that they spend time in museums making copies, but is it reasonable to expect all viewers to do that? (I was shocked and dismayed to see how little NYC museum attendees regard great works of art, flitting from one painting to the next clicking snapshots with their phones and moving on.)
 
No, I wish for my viewers to look with attention, and believe they can do so without painting or making any other heroic effort. As can I. I acknowledge that some views are best appreciated right now, with deep attention.
 
The rest of the way through Mississippi on the Natchez Trace Parkway I practiced seeing actively, without immediately thinking of painting or photographing. I arrived home with an enhanced sense of beauty, which I intend to nourish. My work in the studio this week is not necessarily improved, but I have certainly enjoyed it in a new way.
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​Content in Art After Post Modernism

7/9/2017

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Art is in a condition of Ultra Free-Range. Perhaps it’s evolution; perhaps it’s just a fashion cycle.

The former kingpins of art, Representationalism (which I prefer to call, more accurately, Illusionism) and Meaningful Content began to crumble during the end of the nineteenth century, and were wiped away by the cognoscenti of the twentieth.

Well, we’re done with that now. The twentieth century is over. 1984, the year we anticipated with dread, is long over and 2001 turned out nothing like the movie.
PictureThe Storm, Pierre Auguste Cot
When I was a kid my stepmother subscribed to a series of educational art folios. The introductory issue featured a reproduction of The Storm painted by Pierre Auguste Cot in 1880, and boy did that folio author tear that painting to shreds. During my college years I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City dozens of times and though The Storm is in the Met’s collection, I never saw it. Last year on my first visit to the Museum in decades, I found The Storm in a position of honor.

So we’re no longer constrained to paint in any particular mode, nor to react against any particular canon.

Today everything is allowed, from the abstract non-objective to the romantic, and though I am personally very happy about that, I find myself in a meta-aesthetic bind. Knowledgeable friends encourage me to take my art in this or that direction. Many point out “errors” that I committed not for error’s sake, but for an expressive reason. I prefer to continue in my chosen path. Some call me contrarian for that.

Comes to mind a brief conversation with Russell Richardson, a former colleague whom I greatly admire. After a meeting during which I remained characteristically silent I confided to him that it troubled me to be so frequently the only one in the room holding a completely divergent opinion. He generously told me that my ideas were valuable to the group and I should voice them; and I, aware that I would just be shouted down, said, “Yes, but it’s not much fun for the person expressing that lonely point of view.”
​
I need to sit down in front of paintings and really hash it out with someone whose opinions and insights are close enough to mine that we don’t need to spend a lot of time finding common ground. No wonder successful artists so often come in pairs.

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