Studio Update

I've temporarily relocated the studio to the garage which is less than ideal but the great benefit of it is the tall ceiling.  I'm now able to work on the bigger pieces I've been meaning to, and I've got more space in which to set up everything I need to work.  In the long term, I'll have something a bit more permanent installed, which I'll be posting on as we go along.   

This piece which I've tentatively entitled "Mother" has been a freeing experience so far.  I used the biggest brushes I could find and after slathering the painting in Mixed White, I worked into it with a straight Burnt Sienna.  I'm not terribly concerned with color or even value at this point.  Hardly any of these marks will survive under the layers that will go over it.  But the goal was to establish early a sense of sweep and liveliness in the painting, as well as to mark the obvious areas of light and dark.

When first attempting to paint, what I found most comforting was the idea that there's little difference between the various media within the two-dimensional realm.  Whether you're working with a pen, crowquil, ink brush, watercolor, gouache, acrylic or oil, you're essentially applying the same techniques of mark-making on a flat surface.  All of the principles of composition, value, balance and rhythm apply.  I find this comforting because there are times when I feel the urge to get everything right in the preliminary sketch so that I don't end up regretting anything later into the painting stage.  I remind myself that I'm "drawing", so to speak, in every stage.  And that there really is no "too late."  I can revise anything, paint over anything, or take a painting in a completely different direction if I so choose.  It's simply a matter of putting another mark down. 

Now that I've established the primary areas of focus, I'm going to put this painting down for a little while and then go back to it with fresh eyes.  At that point, I'll go back to my biggest brushes, introduce a cooler palette, and play a bit with looser strokes and textures to accomplish the sweep of the body, remembering not to get too specific so as not to compete too much with the specificity of the two heads.  I'm also planning on a few layers of atmosphere on top of this.  So I know I'm nowhere near finished, and that what I'm seeing here will undergo many shifts and tweaks before I'm through.  Looking forward to it. 

"Heaven & Earth": Process Notes

Now that my work's on public display, I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk a bit about my process.  Here's the gist of it.

First, I get an idea.  I get ideas all the time, actually, far more than I can ever implement, which is a good thing.  Sometimes they pan out and sometimes they don't.  Sometimes I think I'm onto something only to run into a dead end halfway through it.  But sometimes it works out happily.  You can never quite predict these things.  Anyhow, hoping for the best, I immediately start sketching thumbnails.  I tend to draw them no larger than a baseball card, sometimes as small as a postage stamp.  I want them to read easily and quickly at any size.  If a painting's going to be any good, it should make some decent sense even from a long way off.

In this case, my idea was to paint two large canvases, one set above the other, one evoking the sky, the other Earth.  I wanted the two to remain separate because I enjoyed the idea of the two functioning as one piece and yet as separate.  I had been thinking about duality at the time, how the known and the unknown, the concrete and ethereal are eternally twinned and yet deeply divided from each other.  I might even say opposed to each other.  And I have to admit, as a human being living on earth I was feeling a bit of frustration at how oblivious nature (or heaven, the "other", the void, whatever you call it) can seem to our concerns.  Part of this thought was also inspired by a painting I had already finished.  It was a large rectangular piece containing nothing but clouds and blue sky.  I spent quite a bit of time on it but in the end, while I was struck by its expressiveness and its subjectivity, I was also struck by its apparent inhumanity.  It seemed empty and full at the same time.  I wanted more, a human element, something with which I could identify or channel myself through.  That was when I decided to rough in that second canvas below it, containing a man sitting by a broken-down boat on a field.  Perhaps by water.  I hadn't decided.  Anyway, I drew it up, worked out some compositional problems, and then went into sketeching the individual pieces in greater detail, always referring back to the thumbnail for composition.

Once I had reached a point where I felt I had enough of it realized, I drew a screen over my thumbnail and reproduced the thumbnail at a much larger scale.  I then got to work on filling in those details on the canvas...

At this point, I'm referring to lots of different photo references.  I prefer to use a variety, not just one, to help me patch together what I'm seeing in my head.  Straight reproduction annoys me but I do find gleaning fundamentals of proportion, texture, and shape from photo references are helpful in keeping me honest.  They're never a substitute for the real thing but oftentimes the real thing just ain't around.  Anyway, while I might call the live model the true star of any realist process, the imagination is ultimately the director, producer, and writer.  And so it was in this case.

Once I felt I had enough information to work with in paint, I put the finished cloud painting on top of this one and washed in some blue on the bottom half to match it.  

At this point, it's all improvisation and play.  I heard someone say once that, in painting, you have to build the stage before you can dance on it.  This is quite true in this case.  I had to build the canvas frame, stretch it, paint and sand about three layers of gesso on it, layout, sketch, compose, transfer, and finally lay in the base underpainting.  Finally, the spontaneity begins and I start to enjoy the unpredictability.  In this case, while I originally had thought the ground would lead down to a beach of sorts, I decided that a cliffside scene would do better.  I was delighted at how odd it might seem to have a boat at the top of a tall cliff, rather than at the bottom of it.  So I put in another cliff in the background to suggest that we were indeed fairly high above sea level.  I played around a bit with the colors in the foreground, keeping the contrast between ruddy earth tones and the greens and grays of the boat, unifying the two in the man sitting by the boat.  Here's the end result, which you can see a bigger shot of in my online gallery and personally at Cupcake Royale.

New Show at Cupcake Royale

If you happen to be in the Seattle area, please stop in to see my work at Cupcake Royale at the Alaska Junction in West Seattle.  A selection of new and old pieces will be on display there for the next two months so check it out and let me know what you think!

The Language of Art

A common defense of representational art contains the notion that a major function of good art is that it speaks for itself.  Somehow it communicates itself to some pre-verbal element of our nature.  We see it and we know.  The thought is that art that seems nonsensical without explanatory statements is not art at all but a rudimentary form of illustration, one that serves as a poor substitute for an essay.  An essay, I suppose, on Art History and our fractured, inexhaustibly self-conscious relationship with it. 
 
Lets say you spot a shoe sitting on the floor in an art gallery.  There's no artist statement next to it, no placard, no author's name, and so on.  You might wonder if somebody just happened to leave it there.  You might not guess that it was strategically placed there by an artist, nor that it's made entirely out of fiberglass and acrylic.  If, after the fact, you were told that it was meant to serve as an art piece, your opinion of it might change.  You'd return and look at it differently, wonder at its execution and...then what? 
 
Here's where the food fight begins.  On the one hand, volumes could be written about the assumptions and paradigms at work in this simple interaction.  The artist could be seen as an insightful commentator on our complicated cultural ties to art.  Or the artist could be seen as passé (just google Duchamp's "Fountain" if you don't know it).  Or the artist could be seen as a practical joker.  Or all of the above.  What we can be sure of is that the debate itself, which I tend to call a judgment debate, happens entirely outside of the piece itself, even if the piece itself provokes, sustains, and finds all of its significance within that debate. 
 
One might compare this phenomenon to listening to music that's meant to be played with lyrics.  Or reading lyrics meant to be sung to music.  Either way, the experience can sometimes feel a bit anticlimactic.  You sense that something's missing.  You may even feel the urge to fill in the blanks in your head.  You see a shoe on the floor and you might imagine a narrative that led to its placement.  My point is that you sense its incompleteness, that there's a blank aching to be filled.  Otherwise, it's just a floating non sequitur.  In the case of the shoe piece, the blank is filled first by the intention and philosophy of the artist as summarized possibly by his statement and/or those of a school or movement he might swear allegiance to (Concept Art, Performance Art, Experience Art, etc.).  Secondly, that blank is filled by the debate over its validity which, in our fame and controversy-oriented culture, can serve as validation enough.  What we can agree on is that the shoe itself is simultaneously important and irrelevant.  Important because it provokes this much thought and debate.  Irrelevant because the debate is more important than the piece, and because the debate does not change whether this shoe is hypothetical or real, whether it were red or blue, a woman's shoe or a man's.  Essentially, it's the only idea of the shoe that matters.  And so, if this line of thought weren't confusing enough, the shoe's irrelevance is part of its significance. 
  
Before I get too far along in this line of thought, let me say that I think this is a perfectly legitimate form of expression, if it can be called that.  It's tricky to think of what to call it, which of course is part of the point.  There are many who prefer this type of "thought art" to any kind of physical or representational art.  More power to them.  It's philosophical, intellectually challenging, and can sometimes lead to some original questions on culture and perception.  As Oscar Wilde put it, a work of art can be practically anything so long as it isn't boring.  This is where I have to admit as an art enthusiast and an artist who works predominantly with representational forms, I have very rarely encountered a work of that kind that didn't bore me.  I have heard people say the same about all representational art.  So, grain of salt and all that. 

Back to the shoe.  What we can also agree on is that both the shoe's purpose and significance are not self-evident.  You need someone to frame it, set it on a pedestal and give you the occasion to think of it as an aesthetic display rather than the accident of a lost shoe.  You need someone to talk about it, write essays about it, and thereby contribute to the canon of judgment debates.  Another way to say this is that the statement, the criticism, the words, tend to matter much more than the piece. 
 
My argument is that much of today's artwork is designed to work only in conjunction with its treatises, manifestos, artist's statements, and its schools of criticism.  Without all that stuff, the work loses most if not all of its power.  In that way, it’s fair to say that such literature is actually a part of the artwork itself, if not its centerpiece.  This brings me back to the defense of representational art, which, as the argument goes, speaks for itself precisely because its purpose and its effect remains relatively the same whether there are any accompanying articles, statements, or manifestos.  It has the air of self-sufficiency.  It’s said that the purpose and significance of a Vermeer, for example, is self-evident precisely because it enchants us.  You don’t have to be briefed on Vermeer, his background, philosophy, or aesthetics in order to appreciate his work.  All that stuff is icing on the cake, so to speak. 
 
But I want to examine a few assumptions here, including my own.  First of all, these ideas of "defense" and "debate" imply that there is some sort of war over how we view art and, by extension, what kinds of art get seen.  While I deeply understand what's at stake in these debates, ie the livelihood of many artists, I wonder if debate is even necessary, given what seems to be at the heart of these sort of debates.  I see two very opposed traditions:  Fashion on the one hand, and Ought on the other. 

The Fashion tradition encourages us to view history as a discrete series of epochs.  It also tends to view history progressively, describing it as a positive movement ever upward, exhausting each epoch and its defining characteristics and then moving on to bigger, better ones.  We saw this sort of thinking very often at the turn of the century, and also in the postwar era.  Bolstered by innovations and discoveries in industry and science, the Make It New ethos has, at worst, shown great interest in abandoning traditions and rejecting so-called received wisdom.  The best of this was revolutionary, but the majority of it privileged mere novelty. 

The Ought tradition holds that there are absolute ways in which one should and shouldn't view and create art.  This relates to notions of usefulness and personal betterment.  It also connotes a "We're all in this together" philosophy that tends to resist a diversity of opinion and expression.  It also contains a belief in objective truths.  Any argument that states that one style or approach of art is somehow more worthy of our attention than others contains some of this Ought-style thinking. 

So those who decry representational art often do so because it's passé and must have exhausted its objective usefulness.  To a strict anti-representationalist, making and viewing new representational art is sort of like attending the Medieval Fair.  It's fun to play dress-up but really there's nothing to experience or learn that hasn't already been done and surpassed by centuries of progress.  One of the proofs of this is the fact that there isn't as much to say about a contemporary realist painting, at least not as much as there would be to say about a staged shoe on the floor of an art gallery.  This is particularly true if, as it is with most representational art, the goal is something so unintellectual as Beauty.  If we are to better ourselves, we ought to be doing more worthwhile things with our time.  The trouble painters find with this approach is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find novel things to say in your artist statement as well as in your criticism, and, by extension, it becomes more difficult to create novel works of art.  I'm using the word "novel" pejoratively here because newness alone is not a virtue.  This does not mean that newness is a bad thing, per se.  It can be quite refreshing, even revelatory.  But without real content, it is merely, as I put it, a novelty.  One of the several reasons some say that painting is dead is that if you're constantly in search of the new at the expense of the good, eventually even art itself will seem passé.   

What are the assumptions of representational artists?  As one of them, I've had to struggle a little to draw them out--a fact that, I would imagine, bolsters the arguments of many non-representationalists, namely that we are engaging in a thoughtless practice, one that does not challenge preconceptions.  I argue, however, that the issue is not a lack of thought, it's this art "speaking for itself" business.  Not only does it speak for itself but it speaks its own language, one we intuit but for which much is lost in translation.  So, in light of that, a better question might be, if (good) representational art speaks for (justifies) itself, what is the nature of its language? 

We can be sure that this language is not one that can't reflect the traditions mentioned earlier, Fashion and Ought.  Representational art has its fads too, as well as its dogmatic adherents.  In a larger sense, referring to intent, we can also say that this language is dedicated to Beauty and Pathos.  In Beauty, we can add a very long list of subsets, ranging from "rich" to "joyful" to "haunting" and even "disturbing."  There's a lot I can say about what's Beautiful but I'll leave it at that for now and follow up in a later post.  Suffice it to say that I distinguish Beauty, which can refer even to a gruesome slaughter house, from mere "Prettiness," which is a facile and ineffective symbol for what amounts to a marriage of convenience between Beauty and Goodness.  Though both are subjective, like Beauty, we know Prettiness when we see  it. 

Furthermore, I'd have to say that I've never seen art that I considered to be excellent that wasn't in some way beautiful.  I know that sort of comment makes many artists and enthusiasts cringe but I'll say it again:  it's Beauty I'm interested in, not Prettiness.  If you're inclined to believe that Beauty's been done to death and it's time to move onto other topics in painting, my answer would be to question whether Beauty is in fact a "topic" in  art at all, as opposed to a fundamental part of what makes art tick.  This isn't the only way to look at art, of course, but I'm hard pressed to see value in art that doesn't in some way address it.  In that light, I'd have to say that is where my "Ought" lies.  I do believe in Beauty as an objective truth.  Though we do not view and interpret it universally, eye of the beholder notwithstanding, I do believe Beauty is a pervasive and ever-present force in all good artistic expression.  Even its absence is a statement.  However, I do grant that there are many who, while they may recognize Beauty, do not value it, or at least do not see it as very important, and see other kinds of expressions as more worthwhile.  I have no problem with that.

Pathos.  Strictly speaking, it's the power to evoke compassion in some way.  A better word than compassion in this case would be empathy.  When you paint a portrait of someone, you intend for your audience to feel some emotional connection with the face you are depicting.  This doesn't mean you like that face, so to speak, but it evokes some understanding. 

When it comes to Pathos in representational art I'm thinking of something similar to what Coleridge referred to in the Biographia Literaria, when envisioning a work that would "transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."  There's much to unpack in that.  Essentially, a bit of realism captures your audience's attention and, in turn, their empathy.  People are more likely to open themselves to an experience if they feel that there is a "human interest and a semblance of truth" in it.  And when they are open, an artist is more likely to elicit a profound emotional response from her audience.  (Note, in this mention of truth, the echo of my earlier description of the Ought tradition.  Yes, even Pathos is complicated!)     

It's this particular approach to Pathos that I believe gets at the heart of this idea that a representational work of art speaks for itself.  It does not approach us intellectually or linguistically, per se.  It approaches the imagination through our suspension of disbelief, which is to say that it accesses our own creative faculty, so that it is as though we were re-creating an actual experience.  To indulge in a mystical term, it does its work on us by way of enchantment. 

 

While I'm very secular in my thinking I do have to wonder at times whether the decline in popularity of representational art has something to do with the rise of secularism.  After all, Coleridge made his reference to the suspension of disbelief as a means to deal with an audience that was increasingly disenchanted with magic and characters like goblins and fairies.  The new age had taken hold and it was a cynical one.  One wonders if enchantment itself has become unpopular in the venues of "serious" art.  

 

On a side note, I'd like to mention that labels like "representational art" and "abstract art" can get very messy very fast.  I have used them here for the purposes of distinguishing art that speaks for itself and art that does not.  But this is not to suggest that only representational art has this quality of speaking for itself.  And it is also unwise to assume that all representational art speaks for itself. 

 

For instance, if I took a printout of one of those automatic photos that get taken when someone runs a red light, and I put that up on the wall and called it art, one could argue that that was representational because it depicts seen realities.  The difference between that and a Vermeer, however, would be very simple.  In the traffic photo, very few if any subjective choices were made.  In that way, it's quite inhuman.  We do not detect enough here, typically, to cause a suspension of disbelief.  In that way, it's more significant as an idea than as an object, specifically because of the questions and judgment debates it brings up.  Similarly, photographers have taken pictures of fine works of art and put them up on the wall just to challenge beliefs about authorship and so on.  This is not a shockingly unusual thing.  Again, though a representational image is on the wall, its function is still more that of a "thought piece" than anything else. 

 

Conversely, a close-up photo of the inside of a green pepper might seem to be abstract.  But because the function of the photo could be to capture and interpret lights and darks, curvature, convergences, soft and hard edges in such a way that they all seem almost sensual and dreamlike, then the photo is more significant as an visual object.  In this light, it's abundantly clear that Beauty in art does not belong solely to the realm of representational art.  For instance, there's something about Rothko's paintings, simple as they are, that is pleasing to the eye, particularly about the ragged, smoky edges between colors.  So we must acknowledge that the world of non-representational art is not homogenous and that neither is the world of representational art.  I'd argue that much finer distinctions can be made when one speaks of art languages. 

 

When perspective was first employed in Western Art it was seen as a cheap parlor trick, a funny sort of illusion.  Some may refer to much of representational art today as a parlor trick, a primitive predecessor to photography.  The flaw in this argument is in the assumption that the intent of at least most representational art is simply to represent (as in reproduce) a seen reality, whereas its primary function is actually not reproductive, it's interpretive.  Take John Singer Sargent as an example.  Aside from being one of the greatest figure and portrait artists, he was also a very accurate draftsman.  He had the ability to create an image that was as precisely realistic as any photograph.  But there are no cameras or software, as of yet, that can create an original Sargentesque painting.  The difference is in the very subjective and personal choices he made in each stroke, as well as the choices he made in what to show and what to obscure.  Photographers make similar choices and when they do it is not mechanical or objective.  It is interpretive.  While there are many guidelines and rules of thumb that both photographers and representational artists heed, their choices, ultimately, tend to be idiosyncratic, arising out their subjectivity.  It is that very subjectivity that we are after, as communicated to us through the language of art.