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Below you'll find miscellaneous musings on divers aspects of painting.
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| success |
People tend to be divided about whether success is an internal or an external commodity. For a painter, it seems there has to be an ongoing balance of both. Its unwise to create a situation in which the work must be sold and soon to eat or pay the rent; its equally unwise to attempt to tailor the work to the aesthetic proclivities of a gallery or subculture. In both cases I can speak from the smoldering rubble of experience. So, given the classical and perennialist foundation that the arts should stand for and augment all that is best in humankind, (with which many persons of the modernist persuation of course do not agree) there are two important things for a painter. First, to create time. There are many levels of this and it is possible to get completely out of the modern hyperversion of time. Without this Old Master sense of spaciousness and endlessness, painting becomes constrained by artificial parameters and deadlines. The second is to paint from the distilled truth of one's experience. Paintings which embody truth succeed because they operate as generators and amplifiers of truth within the visual world. Seeing a true painting, the viewer is reminded of their own truth, and puzzles out a complex relationship with the truth of the painter. This is why people stand in front of paintings motionless for a long time. They're not just looking out, they're looking in as well.
The world is especially in need of amplified personal truth because there is so much amplified concensus falsehood at this point provided by institutions and their subsidiary media. Humanity needs creativity to grow and solve its many problems. Creativity does not function in an atmosphere of deception and falsehood, the faculty shuts down without trust, cosmic law. But very few people have devolved beyond the buoyant sense of purpose created by an aesthetic encounter with truth. These feelings create their own internal ripples and can go quite deep. This seems like an honorable activity to engage in: instead of combatting negativity on its own negative terms, it is neutralized by its opposite. So, instead of defining success as a long list of shows or awards or galleries, I'd define it as living and painting the truth on the one hand, and surviving on the other. These concepts are in many ways opposites, and when they are brought into close contact with one another, great energy and numerous avenues of possibility are created.
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| the logic of light |
Light never does anything illogical: if it did our lives would be impossible. Realistic painting has always relied on an understanding of the hard rules governing the relationship of light to color. I first noticed this when I realized that older painters operated with several specific systems for creating light in color – that is, the illusion of dimension in the flat picture plane -- without copying the exact colors they were looking at. All these systems were fundamentally abstract, but were united in execution: if they used warm colors for the light, they used cool colors for the shadows, and visa versa. So, when the Dutch used white – the coolest shade of blue -- for light they made very warm – red-orange -- shadows to create the illusion of depth. This is most apparent in studying the highlight in the cheek of a period portrait, which is typically almost pure white, and the relatively vivid red-orange that exists in the shadow below the chin.
So, any realistic painting is unified around a color of light and an opposite color of shadow. These influence the higher and lower values in the painting respectively, providing a kind of atmospheric filter. But any pair of opposite colors contains the three primaries. So, three primaries and white are the fundamental building blocks of the painter's palette. For older painters they were often earth colors: black, red earth, and yellow earth, for modern painters they are more apt to be more pure, higher chroma pigments. If you think about the mixing possibilities here in terms of percentages, even if we take 10% as our increment there are 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 colors available in this palette, i.e. 10,000. Painters can do significantly better than this, but it takes time to understand how fine the gradations can become and to develop the manual dexterity necessary to make them.
Most of the thinking we do is linear: we write from left to right, music has a beginning, middle, and end, we think of time as linear even though physicists have been saying otherwise for decades: but color cannot be approached in a linear manner if we are to make light.
At the very least, we need to learn to think in a circle, and all more dedicated, “scientific” color models are in fact three dimensional. I've noticed with students over the last decade that this is harder for adults to “get” than it is for children, whose thought patterning is more flexible. But I've also seen adults – myself included – go to great lengths to come to a functional comprehension of light. This is because linear thinking presents opposites that can only be reconciled by compromise, and compromise actually works for neither party.
In contrast, circular thinking is in alignment with the classical Greek concept of thesis and anti-thesis combining to produce a new creative synthesis. (Our meaning for the word “synthetic” has no bearing on the original meaning of this word). This is of course the original symbolism of the equilateral triangle, that all-important figure to Pythagoras, (who was, incidentally, essentially a spiritual, not scientific figure in his era).
Holding to the validity of equal and opposite positions generates massive creative energy. Because there is no judgment involved something new can be born that was – in terms of the old equation – unthinkable. A good functional example of this is the time honored opposition of black and white. The compromise is gray. But creative synthesis introduces a new dimension, in this case, the concept of color. Each new synthesis then breaks down into a new pair of opposites, and the process repeats itself, but again with an unexpected result.
Writers often write about painting but miss the painter's crucial perceptual shift because they haven't experienced it so therefore it doesn't exist. What's Bred In The Bone, by Robertson Davies, is certainly an excellent novel containing capable literary research into early Renaissance imagery, but obviously without any practical research into painting itself on the part of its author. This is fine, of course, because the readership also has no practical experience of painting. But how does anyone actually learn what painting is if it is unwittingly but very willingly misrepresented? Should the public have more sense than to accept a non-practitioner's opinion of a practice? Or does it simply get what its limited attention span determines that it deserves? As a painter, this situation leaves me feeling as though, not for the first time, painting has been appropriated for writing's linear agenda without any respect for or comprehension of the very real difference in the way painting utilizes the brain. Bruegel painted this situation and its ramifications in The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind. Bosch touched on a related aspect in The Conjurer.
The important aspect of this is not the potential arrogance of writers or writing per se (too easy!) but the way linear thinking engenders a false sense of expertise or empirical certainty about what is and isn't possible. This tends to hold back our evolution as a species as though by some form of unfortunate mutual consent. On the other hand, the more a given individual explores life with sincerity and an open mind, the more life's multi-dimensional creative potential unfolds. There is no one empirical reality, the universe reinvents itself continually. As such, we are free to choose the most excruciating limitations, and free to choose to move beyond them.
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| painting itself |
“Your heart is the big box of paints.” -- Andy Partridge.
Seneca, writing in the time of Nero, and being unusually succinct, tells us that people paint for three different reasons: fame, fortune, or truth. The tension produced in the history of Western painting by the endless permutations derivative of this oracular triumvirate has resulted in an incredible creative diversity. Who controls painting? The Church? The Duke? His wife? The Commissar? The critics? The buyers? The painters? The turmoil has been endless and makes a fascinating study. Why all the struggle over this particular piece of cultural real estate? What makes it so very valuable?
Modern Art, with it's power centers in large metropoli such as Paris and New York, made a concerted effort in the second half of the 20th century to destroy painting. Painting was declared over, dead, passe, et al. Of course this didn't work and torch-bearing modernist institutions are now involved in a complex rehabilitation of a form of expression that an extraordinary amount of urban intellectual ordnance didn't kill but simply made stronger. How did painting survive?
St. Francis famously said: “The laborer works with his hands, the craftsman with his heart and hands, the artist with his head, heart, and hands.” The great strength of painting, the cause of all the struggle over its territory, is due to the magic of this third element, the heart. An image of truth, an image which balances the aspects of head, heart, and hands, communicates directly with the human soul. A great painting provides the distilled essence of it's maker's experience: looking at a late Chardin still life, or a Rembrandt self-portrait, one suddenly spans centuries of difference in time and culture via a form of wisdom which is incontrovertibly alive.
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| done yet? |
The question of when (and how!) a painting is finished has plagued painters always. Sometimes painters are adroit enough to alter the general sense of what “finished” means without undue controversy: the essentialization of Chardin is a great example. Turner encountered more opposition, probably by design. He once asked the English representative of an American buyer how his employer had found the painting. The representative said, “He thinks it indistinct.” Turner replied, “You should tell him that indistinctness is my forte.”
Nowhere has the question of finish been more controversial than in the early days of Monet's experiments with broken color: even critics who were in sympathy with his ideas found the surfaces simply too raw or under-developed. Monet ultimately solved this by using a truly heroic quantity of paint on many of his images, applied in many layers over time, but his correspondence also involves many anguished concerns about having gone too far and “ruined” something. In contrast, Boudin – whose broad use of paint was very influential in helping Monet depart from the influence of Corot and Manet – solved the problem by principally painting smaller works from life that could be effectively finished in one sitting.
As usual, to create maximum confusion, I explore both poles. The goal is the same: to be able to say it's done. But the results have different feelings. Trying to finish a painting in a single sitting produces lots of energy and tension that can be used to propel the painting along. The first reaction of viewers to these works is usually stronger, but it seems unwise to rely too heavily on painterly charisma. Working on a painting in many layers involves finding a deeper and quieter form of essentialization that is always hard won: hitting dead-end after dead-end, the image eventually emerges from the labyrinth. I often work on this type of painting using a photograph but they're always finished without any reference other than themselves. Recently I've been approaching a form of synthesis: working on an image for several days in a row in one dense layer of paint, then adding minimal finishing touches a few weeks later.
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| stop. look. evolve. |
The still life process I use relies on looking at things closely for a long period of time. You would think this would be boring but an interesting phenomenon occurs during this process: the more you look, the more you see. In other words, the apple I observe at first is very different from the one I see after an hour.
You can experiment with this process simply by drawing the outline of an apple with a pencil. Draw it lightly, and then begin to correct what you've drawn. At first it's frustrating because you quickly realize that the original outline is wrong. But this frustration is the energy that you will then use to correct the situation. Bit by bit, it gets better. Bit by bit, you see more of the subtleties and intricacies of the outline. It's round, but not like a circle is round. But is there any flat place? Are there any concave places? This is the beginning of Nature's great lesson. But it's secrets are hidden from those in a hurry. To understand even something as ontologically simple as the outline of an apple, we need to slow down and pay attention in a different way than that of the modern world.
In the last decade I've been amazed repeatedly by the complexity of simplicity. This seems to occur because, when we stop, our conciousness stops ranging around on the surface and begins to settle down. As it settles, it goes deeper. How deep does it go? I can't tell you because I haven't found the bottom. There are plateaus, but then, as in quantum mechanics, a sudden shift occurs and I'm somewhere else. The paintings of apples have been a great exercise in developing patience, waiting for the next level.
There's a fascinating reciprocity here. As I learn to see more, I'm also changed by the process into someone who wasn't there before. The apple changes, but I do too. So, I have to wonder, am I painting the apple, or is the apple painting me?
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| becoming the sky |
I was showing a friend various landscapes in progress recently and explained at one point that I was having trouble with a certain sky. My friend asked me why I didn't simply invent the sky. I confess the question took me utterly aback, and I felt additionally confused because I had no idea why at first. To gain time I mumbled uncertainly
about specific times having specific skies, which cut little enough mustard with the questioner you can be sure. But as I've thought about it, it seems reasonable to point out that the sky has already been invented, and that a very good job was done in this particular department. What I want to do is make an effort to understand the i incredible combination of subtlety and complexity that we perceive daily in the sky. Somewhere along this line of inquiry, art will happen, but to me this art attains validity from the effort at transparence, at becoming the sky, so to speak, that precedes it. This is different than copying the sky, which I'm not interested in either. But if I try to become the sky, I'll learn something even though I fail. If I invent it, I won't learn anything, even if I make something that most people would call art. This is a fundamental dilemma of the process I work within: and is perhaps the crux of the difference between modern and older painting. I've given up trying to solve it, which has allowed it to become much more interesting.
Learning to make landscapes inside has been the most difficult thing I've taken on. Many years of outside landscape work have created high standards for the feel of a given place and time, and this has taken a long time to reconstruct effectively in the studio context.
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| the climate of delight |
“Delight is a secret. And the secret is this: to grow quiet and listen; to stop thinking, stop moving, almost to stop breathing; to create an inner stillness in which, like mice in a deserted house, capacities and awarenesses too wayward and too fugitive for everyday use may delicately emerge. Oh, welcome them home! For these are the long-lost children of the human mind. Give them close and loving attention, for they are weakened by centuries of neglect. In return they will open your eyes to a new world within the known world, they will take your hand, as children do, and bring you to where life is always nascent, day is always dawning. Suddenly and miraculously, as you walk home in the dark, you are aware of the insubstantial shimmering essence that lies within appearances; the air is filled with expectancy, alive with meaning; the stranger, gliding by in the lamp-lit street, carries silently past you in the night the whole mystery of his life...
Delight springs from this awareness of the translucent quality in all things, whereby beauty as well as ugliness, joy as well as pain, men as well as women, life as well as death -- the grinding clash of opposites between whose iron teeth all systems of philosophy are crushed at last to pulp -- are seen as symbols; in the true meaning of a symbol, whose Janus-like face contains at once that which exists in time and space, and that which transcends it.”
--Alan McGlashan, The Savage and Beautiful Country, 1967
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| into the labyrinth |
As a painter I had always made certain materials, mostly mediums and grounds, had always read about how older paintings were made. I’d also always wondered why older paintings centuries looked so much better than modern paintings only decades old. In 2001 I began to look for a more satisfying answer to this question by doing further research into old manuscripts and materials. There is no current source of information about older painting technique: all modern academic writing dismisses it. For about a year, I worked with two “experts” I came across online. They were making and promoting lesser known period materials and had both developed theories about how to paint in an older manner. But these experts were saying very different things and over time I began to wonder how impartial they actually were. It seemed as though there were many pieces to the puzzle and no one had assembled all of them correctly. It also seemed there was plenty of authority but less flexibility, plenty of theory but less practice.
So I decided that no one knew anything. This was a very refreshing position. Clearly, the thing to do was simply to make my own materials based on the usually somewhat sketchy information in the old texts and find out through trial and error what they were in fact about. This process turned out to be similar to making bread: it’s easy to make a loaf of bread; it takes longer to make a great loaf of bread. So, at first, many loaves were made, few were eaten. Also, I began to make everything: paint, medium, ground, and sometimes it became hard to tell who was doing what. Working on panels, it was possible for me to work with egg yolk emulsions and, although these are archival and I liked the many variations possible, they clearly were different, not of the answer. I also became very involved in making the hard resin varnishes: amber, copal, and sandarac dissolved in oil at high temperature. This aspect of the process became an end in itself and took several years to perfect.
The addition of a small amount of hard-resin varnish to the paint on the palette is part of one of the earliest known descriptions of oil painting technique. This, and the prominence of amber varnish in the research of De Mayerne (1573-1654), led me to agree with several nineteenth century researchers (Eastlake, Merrifield, Merimee) that the use of a hard resin varnish was responsible for the look and longevity of older painting. By the last quarter of 2006 I had perfected a version of this technique that could be used alla prima or for painting in layers.
But in 2006 the research developed another angle via the yearly technical bulletins of the National Gallery in London, featuring articles on the materials and techniques used to make older painting gathered from current conservation practice. The information here told a different story in general: very little resin used in older painting, significant use of translucent extenders like chalk or finely ground silica, and the use of a material dubbed “semi heat bodied oil” by the researchers.
This information was a little hard on my theory, even more so because it was a good fit with the known practice of older painters of keeping their brushes in oil. (Brushes used with a hard-resin enhanced paint or medium must be cleaned with solvent). But the true coup de grace came from another National Gallery publication, this one titled “Rembrandt: Art in the Making.” Again, in the very precise scientific analysis of Rembrandt’s paint, no resins were found except in isolated cases, such as a madder lake glaze.
Now, all this lack of resin might have been a bit suspect if no resin had ever been found by these techniques. But, unfortunately for my theory, this same group of researchers found amber varnish in the work of one of Rembrandt’s pupils, and a much earlier sandarac spirit varnish on a tempera painting from the workshop of Durer. For a few weeks after reading this book I struggled mightily to maintain my theory in the face of the evidence. But finally I decided that it would actually be more interesting to just try to figure out how the same look might be achieved using only oil in the medium. No resins.
This inversion of my inherent prejudice proved to be the turning point, as, by this time I knew generally speaking how the paint had to behave. As soon as a made my first – in retrospect sort of crude – medium using marble dust and oil I realized that I had been too smart to explore the obvious, and that this material had much more rheological potential than I would ever have thought possible. In 2007 I made several dozen variations on this simple putty principle, using various stone dusts and various combinations of heat or sun bodied oils. Ultimately I was able to begin to understand the unique ability of Rembrandt’s paint to be both layered cleanly and carved, or ploughed, while still wet. While there is still much to learn here I’m now able to do anything with the putty enhanced paint that I could before using amber. But the look of these paintings is slightly deeper, somehow more welcoming, and feels on the right path to me for the first time since entering the labyrinth of older technique.
During this research I came across many aspects of the traditional materials that could be described as “secrets”. This has been both useful and fun, the researcher’s alchemical vindication, but whether these are lost secrets or found secrets can of course never be known. I’ve simply been fascinated by the way paying attention to the behavior of the materials within the dual context of the older texts and modern research has developed a current process that lives in the spirit of older painting. Chardin said it takes thirty years to make a painter. In 2008, I’m now in year twenty-four. So I think he had it about right.
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| the process and the pea |
We live in a world of opposites which interact and inform our lives: day/night, sun/moon, male/female, sleeping/waking: these pairs are so built-in that we tend to take the system and it’s method of functioning for granted. In our emotional lives we experience the same polarity: happiness/sadness, boredom/engagement, sympathy/detachment. We struggle for more from the positive side of the equation: more happiness, more enthusiasm, but early on life teaches us that being happy all the time is not possible. Moving a bit further into this we realize that the sameness of constant happiness would negate its value: constant happiness, in fact, would be boring.
This leads to the idea that our lives are in fact about movement throughout a complex matrix of axes where any positive aspect gains in meaning and value through the experience of the negative aspect. But, no matter what equation we work on and solve in a positive way, we can be sure a new equation is waiting with a variation on the theme for which we are conceptually unprepared. As we develop and evolve, the process spirals on. We strive to remain stable and balanced, but learn that true balance is in fact active and dynamic. Via this often difficult process of trial and error, cause and effect, we learn how to grow into ever more complex and interesting versions of ourselves. Or not: we have that choice as well.
In this context, it should come as no surprise that the traditional process of realistic oil painting which matured in Europe during the Renaissance also involves the interaction of many opposites: dark and light values, transparent and opaque paint, colors which are warm or cool: the skillful practitioner can manipulate the interaction of these three axes to create an effective illusion of light and depth on a flat surface such as a canvas or panel.
But a work of art is more than just skill, or copying. How often have we seen paintings with a great deal of detail and execution which are somehow boring or drain our enthusiasm? It’s as though the painter is simply tracing a projected photograph and filling in the blanks in a paint-by-number process.
Great painting is a function of what the painter chooses to leave out as well as what is put in. The painter convinces the viewer of the reality of the scene in spite of the viewer knowing – at some level – that this is not quite how it would have looked in person, not the photo a digital camera would have taken. But in this context, the viewer doesn’t care about how it might have looked, because the viewer is so effectively presented with how it feels. The complex dialogue between literal and emotional validity could be used as a fundamental conceptual framework for studying the history of oil painting. Is one more important than the other? What makes their advanced interaction at once so compelling and so difficult to achieve?
In coming to terms with this process – over and over – I’ve found that the answer has been to follow my enthusiasm. Otherwise, the process quickly becomes labored and the feeling has a way of saying good-bye. By becoming attuned to what wants to happen, by leaving all conscious plans and ideas behind, a more natural and enthused process results. This process is not more organized, but it is more efficient. Ideas and plans necessarily involve conscious judgment – this, but not this – whereas creativity is the result of the tension inherent in the non-judgmental inclusion of opposites. As a simple example, if we have white at one end of the line and black at the other, the typical compromise is a shade of gray. But if we affirm both white and black and refuse the perennially unsatisfying compromise, we move off the line into another dimension, in this case the concept of color. This is of course an application of the thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis of the ancient Greeks, synthesis being the third point which creates the equilateral triangle so often associated with the creative process.
When I work I’m constantly involved in something I call a turnaround: an inversion of the emphasis of the way the previous process developed. This can be making the same painting in an opposite style, changing the medium so that it behaves in the opposite way, changing from work which is tight to work that is loose, or changing the painting style itself from realistic to abstract.
Once I became aware of the growth this way of working builds into the process, it became fun to puzzle out new ways to apply it, although it often does a turnaround on its own at this point. Being human and what’s worse, male, I still try to figure out what’s going to happen next. But it’s futile; the process has a life of its own and delights in showing me who’s in charge. The irony of course is that, while this is often disconcerting and makes finishing work to a deadline impossible, it is also much more interesting than anything I could possibly think up myself.
My conclusion from these last few years of work is that just at the perimeter of our conscious lives is a vast, infinitely creative principle which is freely available to us all; we can chose to work with or not. The key to accessing this principle is the heart, not the mind, because the heart is able to leap beyond the judgments of the mind. This principle cannot be subverted, harnessed, or controlled: the introduction of the usual pragmatic worldly agenda simply causes it to withdraw everything but a lingering ironic smile. I’ve had to learn this the hard way on a few occasions, and it felt like I’d lost my closest friend. I don’t know where it’s leading me but I trust it to continue to offer the possibility of learning and growth until I’m no longer able to pick up a paintbrush. Which seems like a good deal to me.
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| troupe |
{indentThe theme of this show is the painter’s perennial search for a way of painting that is satisfying. This search began when I started working in oil in 1985, but became more earnest, at times obsessive, six years ago with a sudden entry into the labyrinth of older painting materials and techniques. In the last few years it has also grown into an ensemble of styles which, while different, use this difference to inform one another, to grow. At one pole there are small still life paintings of simple objects on which I often work for years, at the other there are outdoor landscape paintings completed on site in a few hours. A third style is the colorshape work, a kind of personal vacation from realism begun in acrylic and exhibited in the mid-eighties but back again in the last few years and significantly livelier in the oil paint I now can make.
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The show offers examples of still life, landscape, and colorshape paintings, with attached stories of process and explanations of how the paintings were made. An exhibit is devoted to the evolution of the outdoor work done this summer at Button Bay. Where relevant, paintings are accompanied by in-progress photographs. A panel is also devoted to the research element of this work into the materials of traditional painting: what I learned, how I learned it.
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The goal for me is to help de-mystify the oil painting process from both the technical and the creative point of view, and to bring the educational process I’ve been involved with internationally via the internet back home to Vermont.
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Modulating the modernist maelstrom.