I’m using my extra money to hire a model for five hours a week. I am a very rich man.
I’m 70 years old. I’m retired. I waited until this year to start taking Social Security. I don’t have to buy much gas. I don’t have to buy new clothes. I don’t care about going out to find a good time.
I’m using my extra money to hire a model for five hours a week. I am a very rich man.
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So the real question for me is, “Why may I not paint like this sometimes and other ways at other times?” Or even in different ways in the same painting! (I do that.)
May I? Yes! Yes I may, and I refuse to give anyone the right to censure me for it. At our book club meeting one night the discussion turned to characterization, which in the novel in question we disparaged as flat. We saw only one aspect of a person. Being me, I woke next morning thinking about painting and after a while about how different some of my paintings are from others. Sometimes when several of my works hang together, one might conclude that they were not all the work of the same artist. I have heard more than once that it is important to present homogeneous art. I have found that to be difficult, because some ideas ask to be realized in one way, others in another. Literati on the written arts: We don’t like flat, single aspect characters. Gallery industry and other art pundits: We like uncomplicated, single aspect artists. There have long been artists who incorporate multiple styles and levels of completion in a single painting. And what’s good enough for El Greco is good enough for me. So please keep in mind that if an artist doesn’t employ one single treatment for every painting, it is quite likely that she* makes choices from among multiple capabilities, and the viewer has one more dimension of the artist’s character and message to enjoy. *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”? Why do human beings make art?
A couple of years ago a friend sent me an article about rattlesnakes and hogs. Supposedly hogs love to eat rattlesnakes, and when they hear a rattle they converge upon it with great enthusiasm. As a result, the writer warned, rattlesnakes have learned not to rattle, and now they are more dangerous than ever. Really? How did that happen? Did the dead rattlesnakes somehow tell the living rattlesnakes what had happened to them, and caution them to stay silent? Or, more likely, did a rattlesnake observe a friend being attacked by pigs, and figure out that to stay alive it must lay low? And then did the snake slither off to counsel every other snake it could find? Those are the only explanations for the education of rattlers I can think up. Maybe you can come up with a better one. I have a different theory, much more plausible, presuming the story itself is true: Not all rattlesnakes rattle. Maybe the propensity to rattle is genetic. Anyway, the noisy snakes who live near pigs are no longer having noisy babies, because they are not having any babies, because they all got eaten! The part of the folksy story that doesn’t work is the notion that snakes figured out that rattling was dangerous and they stopped on purpose—i.e. that snakes form intentions based on inductive inference. But it is a common human fallacy to believe that things happen because the world chose a carefully considered action. Not everything that happens in the world happens because someone or something had a thought-out purpose. Beware of teleological thinking. Phenomena have causes, but they don’t necessarily have reasons. There might be no thought-out purpose for the appendix. And whose idea was it for my hair to be thinning to the point of disappearing? Does that have some profound rationale? Maybe to keep hat makers in business? But then we can ask, what is the purpose of keeping hat makers in business? At some point that silly regress has to stop, because it gets ridiculous. But hold on a second. There are many people who say everything happens for a reason. It is impossible to convince those people otherwise, so if you want to stop reading now, I don’t mind. Does everything happen for a reason? If so, then some reasons are known only to God. But God is God, infinite, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful, and His reasons for things are far beyond our understanding. As far as explanatory value is concerned, there is no difference between saying “Some things just exist for no purpose known to us,” and “Everything has a reason, but only God knows what that is.” Human beings are makers. We just are. In prehistory our creative nature helped us survive and it still does, but it also helps us kill each other and lay waste to our world. We have no comprehensible reason for that. Making paintings springs from that same source. Creativity is an important part of being human and we all have those impulses; we just don’t express them in the same way. So why do we paint? We can answer the question either of two ways: We paint because we are just made that way, or We paint because it pleases God, Who has His ineffable reasons. Either way, we now know that if we feel like painting we can go ahead and paint without worrying that we are missing the real underlying reason for it. There is no reason that we will ever know. Same for writing. This little painting is significant to me because it brings me closer to the way I imagine I want to paint.
The setting was an April morning at the Riverfront Park in Washington, Missouri, on the Missouri River. The grass was very green, some of it overlaid by a pattern of vertical black stripes, silhouettes of the legs of picnic tables. The air was wet. When it came time to paint the bridge, of which I am very fond, my brush was running dry, but rather than reloading it I just kept going until the bridge disappeared. After I painted that basic green triangle of grass I put in a park bench and its shadow on the lawn, then I painted it out. I had gone a little too far with the grass at the bottom, then realized my mistake and stopped. I came very near to painting the black stripes of the picnic table legs, because I do love a screen. As you can see, I abandoned that inspiration. In the foreground was the now unstriped concrete walk. It was roughly the color of the toned canvas so I left it unpainted. Rather than matching the sidewalk color and obliterating the erring green patch, I left it. I decided not to modulate the color of the sidewalk or draw division lines in perspective, though these would have made the sidewalk appear properly horizontal. Why did I stop at this point? Because it felt right to do so. And why did it feel right to do so? Let me step out of myself and see if I can answer that. Psychologists and philosophers are finding it more and more profoundly true that our brains are very busy behind the scenes, and it is not just that some material has been suppressed, possibly later to be retrieved. A psychologist may be able to perform CTL-ALT-DEL on a person, but the real material is unreachable, ineffable. The unconscious logic of the brain is not part of anything we know, just as the screen of this computer can never display what is going on inside the computer. We could put code up on the screen along with task reports, but even if this screen were now full of formulas and schematics, still the display would leave out entire layers of computer activity, including, for example, the commands for translating its logic into code then into letters. Forgive me if I am stating what is obvious to you. And if it is obvious also that the same is true of people. The content of a person’s mind is a very shallow representation of all that is going on. Sometimes, though, what does become conscious seems at odds with what we know of ourselves. We can make suppositions of hidden brain-work, but we can never know for sure. That bridge is physically coming down this year. It will be gone by the time I return to Washington, Missouri. It is already disappearing in my painting. I did not paint that on conscious purpose, but had the insight much later. As for the green triangle of grass and plain tan sidewalk, I am attracted to juxtaposed patches of color, have been since nursery school. Color harmonies are, for me, the basis for this and most other paintings. I am so emphatic about it, and arrogant, that if you don’t like my colors I suspect you haven’t yet developed a sophisticated color sense. In this painting* I enjoy the harmonic relationships among the colors of the sky, the trees, the water, the grass, and the sidewalk. If you don’t like them it’s okay. You can’t help it; you just don’t know any better. I jettisoned the park bench and black stripes because they would interfere with the proclamation of the preeminence of color. Even allowing the errant green to remain supports that statement. I let the distant trees recede and the water has some depth, but that is the end of my concessions to those who insist on illusionism. “Sidewalk?” they might say. “How can you tell it is a sidewalk and not a sandbank? It just stands up there.” Yup. I’ve shown you I can paint depth; now please spend a moment contemplating the meaning of a presentation of contrast between painting an illusion and painting what I really see. That’s my best guess as to the inner working of my brain speaking. I, this conscious mindful I, did not let a bridge fade or simplify a bright green triangle or allow a sidewalk to go undefined for any deliberate reasons; I just stopped painting when I was told to. But wait; there’s more—as soon as I choose a painting to go with the next installment. *Please understand that colors on the computer, despite my best efforts, are not true. My more recent work has been worrying me a little bit. Even at my advanced age I am learning by leaps and bounds. I am discovering and implementing advances in my conception and execution with every new serious work. But most of the breakthroughs are subtle even if profound. I am very happy with my progress but am I cutting edge enough? Am I producing works of significance? Sometimes I think, sure, this is working pretty well, but isn’t it just another magazine illustration—or less?
Those close to me do see my evolution, and are excited for me, but I find myself pondering my beautiful-woman-in-the-movies question: We see a stunning woman in films, acting as an average person, and there is no question about her. If you see her on the street you see a knockout. She is gorgeous on screen and she is gorgeous on the street. Somehow we tolerate the idea that someone so beautiful could lead so prosaic a life as she plays in the movies. But what about the average-looking woman on screen? She plays the not-so-attractive second fiddle to the stunner but how does she come across on the street, walking among the rest of us poor fours and fives? I suspect that in daily life many such a “mere” seven is recognized as a beauty. I cannot forget that however much my work pleases me and those around me, it is very much just another also-ran in the wider world. James Lord, in his book A Giacometti Portrait, quotes Giacometti as envying the everyday illustrators who could make straightforward renditions of people. Lord was surprised; I wasn’t. I too worry about all the things I am not. According to tests, I am pretty smart, but I am no Giacometti, no Picasso, no Modigliani. I could emulate those guys, but I could never have been them. The same is true in mathematics and any other talent that I enjoy. Even if I were one in ten thousand, I would still share the stage with 700,000 others (because there are 7 billion people on Earth), and I am thoroughly comfortable with working at my own ascending level of proficiency. Some of us resort to planned obsolescence but I don’t want to do that—not because I expect these paintings to be around in 500 years, but because I don’t like the look on my own easel. That’s not to say I don’t bring everything I know to bear on every painting. There is so much to learn in the pursuit of this calling; and whether it is from books, or looking at the art of others—from the cave paintings to museums to the web—or from practice, a committed artist will never stop striving for the mastery that eludes us. I just want to do genuine work, real work, authentic work. I want my goals to be purely artistic, and not polluted with the attempt to be anybody else’s idea of fashionable. I resent any pressure—and it is everywhere—to be unique, to be shocking, to be sensational. Each of us is already quite unique, and the world is sometimes shocked at those of us who let it show. It’s not easy to be authentic; it’s sensational when we succeed. I am working very very hard at sticking to my own inspiration. Coming up: What do I want from this? and What makes the great so great? During last spring’s Augusta (Missouri) Plein Air Art Festival, Lon Brauer and I were wrapping up after a day of painting together by an old house. (Not this one. This painting is new.) He said, among other things, that it was essential to figure out why we do this painting thing. It was not clear whether he meant that as a personal question for me, as a personal question for each of us, or as a general question for the art world; and I didn’t ask because I like that question, have asked it of myself in all its forms, and didn’t want to limit its scope just then. All three versions are worthy of exploration. Tackling the first version of Lon’s question and speaking for myself, I lament our huge isolation. We connect only in the absolute identity of Atman in all of us—God peers out at and through us from every pair of eyes—but we are unable to realize the fact, and can only compare experiences with each other but never live the experiences of another. I don’t know if that lament is universal—the behavior of some indicates the possibility that it is not. On the other hand the work of many artists suggests that the lament is widespread.
I was talked out of that series by a RISD student whose work in retrospect was a rather trite juxtaposition of good and evil, but I succumbed to his opinion because he was in art school, which I was never able to attend (well, until age thirty-five, very part-time, but that’s another story). Clearly I was excessively vulnerable then; but with no schooling, mentoring or support of any kind I didn’t know better. That episode and others have everything to do with my current studio work in seclusion. Not that I was afraid of criticism, but that I wanted to find out what I was really doing without distraction.
For five decades I have read voraciously, looked at art everywhere, and practiced painting and drawing whenever I could. I studied and practiced color theory, perspective, composition and aesthetics, but somewhere along the line I lost any interest in the communion of feelings. Art was properly concerned only with purely visual components. Narrative, expression and symbol need not apply. So guess what I’ve discovered! You have probably figured it out already. Nothing has changed; I am still the same person. For the last several years I have been unintentionally engaged with depicting evocative scenes. As far as I can tell at the moment every other artistic skill I have been developing has been in the service of my unconscious objective: attempting to close the gap between you and me. More on the ancillary pursuits in future posts. 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… 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. 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. 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. 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.) In the summer of 1965 my friend Phillip and I hitchhiked from New Jersey to his aunt’s and uncle’s ranch outside Sheridan, Wyoming. As we waited for rides I rendered landscapes with gouache, pen and ink, and pencil, my first real series of plein air works. I still have many of those fifty-year-old works on paper.
The next summer I invited myself to return for a week, this time with my oils. I made this little painting near the end of the Burgess’s mile-long driveway on an especially good day, during which I produced several paintings. During this early phase I was exploring the use of line in conjunction with color areas, a concept that persisted with me and developed over a period of more than ten years. To deny the dominance of line over color boundary, the playful strokes only suggestively track the contours of the shapes of color, as if to insist that the purpose of the line was not simply to outline, but to counterpoint. In later years, when the study of color became preeminent for me, carefully drawn contour lines did define color areas, because I wanted the juxtaposition of bright colors to be taken seriously. I would have painted more on that trip, but the man of the house disapproved of me and insisted that if I stay there I must help his ranch hands bale and stack oats. (Oats do not like to be baled, and they bolt for freedom at any opportunity.) Fortunately Phillip’s aunt intervened after a couple of days, asserting that painting was my work and that I would be baling no more oats. About the signature, being called by my middle name was the idea of my stepmother, who disliked the name George because it was “common and ordinary.” For twenty-three years my middle name misrepresented me as a snob and I could never understand why until at age 30 I took back my common and ordinary name and was immediately treated like a regular person. Turning 46 was a milestone for me because at last I had been called by my right name for at least half my life. And much more than half now, thank you, Lord, for my survival! But enough about me. Please go look at my paintings. |
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