re-edited on the occasion of the exhibition Bernard Chaet (1924 – 2012): A Life in Art – Alpha
Gallery, Boston – December 1, 2012 through January 2, 2013

Bernard Chaet taught painting and drawing at the Yale University Art Department from 1951-1990 and was the Chairman of the Art Department for a number of years.

Chaet’s friend and School of Art colleague William Bailey called the painter “one of the great figures in American art.”

A very good article from a 2013 WBUR episode by Greg Cook is transcribed here Bernard Chaet’s Far Horizon and this Wikipedia page.

Bernard Chaet’s, The Art of Drawing, comes out of his teaching experience at Yale and is put to great use here in this timeless book about creative drawing. This book has been hugely popular and influential to art students for many years. It’s more about making art than technique and materials. Even as he introduces basic concepts such as line and value, his illustrations show the inventive ways great artists used these concepts in the making of their art. Chaet avoids the regurgitation of academic rules that discourages creativity and provides a fresh approach that is as relevant today as when this book first was published in the ’70s.

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The Wayne Art Center press release states:

The Nude, Mirror of Desire picks up the theme of Philadelphia’s centrality to negotiating the charged subject of the figure. Ben Kamihira, Paul DuSold, Margaret McCann, and Scott Noel paint the figure from personal obsession, but with an equal feeling for the traditions of eloquence the subject has inspired throughout the history of painting. Along with the hope of providing visual pleasure, the painters ask very quietly, what becomes of desire when it encounters the demands of form?

The video below shows Scott Noel and Paul DuSold talking about how this show came about as well as explaining in depth the central ideas around this show.

Wayne Art Center The Nude Mirror of Desire and Nude Figure Exhibition from Jill Frechie on Vimeo.

Both shows will run from October 16th through November 19, 2016.
The Wayne Art Center is located at 413 Maplewood Avenue in Wayne, PA

Other related events include
Artists’ Talk with Scott Noel and Paul DuSold
Saturday, October 29, 3:00pm. Davenport and ESCS Galleries
Please register at info@wayneart.org.

Model Talk with Ruth Weisberg
“What Happens when You Get an Itch?: True Confessions of a Nude Art Model”
Friday, November 4, 12:30pm. ESCS Gallery

Workshop: Nude Figure Drawing with Paul DuSold
October 29 and 30, 10am – 4pm

Workshop: Figure Drawing & Painting with Scott Noel
November 5 and 6, 10am – 4pm

The Nude Figure Award Winning Artists:

Elise Schweitzer, Best in Show Parachute, Parsonage

Marcus Michels, Most Poetic Curl

Tamie Beldue,  Best Drawing Transitory Nude

Chris Smith, Best Sculpture Antigone Enthroned

Jeff Dion, Best Male Nude Reclining Male with Sphere

Eleanor Allen, Best Female Nude BODYHOUSE I, II, III

Patrice Poor,  Best Narrative Figure The Visitor

Aaron Thompson, Best Premier Coup Drift

Michael Doyle, Best Figure in Landscape Nude in Woodland Stream

The post Wayne Art Center celebrates the nude figure with two exhibitions appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

Thank you

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This essay explores the subconscious impulses behind aesthetic choice and offers a framework for a deeper understanding of contemporary representational painting. It is written by a painter with a readership of painters in mind, but is appropriate for anyone who wants this specific peek into the creative psyche.

“Apollo and Dionysus in the Representational Painting Family Feud” was published on December 24, 2014 in Kitsch & Beauty: The Proceedings of The Representational Art Conference 2014, edited by Michael J. Pearce, PhD, MFA.

Why do specific stylistic approaches in representational art occasion so much vitriol between different artistic camps? Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic, described in The Birth of Tragedy, offers insight into the subconscious sources of our aesthetic biases. Broadly speaking, Apollonian traits are civilizing, analytical, and constructive, while Dionysian traits are chaotic, ecstatic, and destructive. By organizing contemporary representational painting into the three fluid categories of classical, observational, and constructed, and then analyzing each category in relation to Nietzsche’s dialectic, we come to see the deeply rooted psychological and philosophical underpinnings of aesthetic choice. We see further that the strong reactions that many viewers hold in relation to specific painting styles are tied to their own positions relative to those styles on the Apollonian/Dionysian continuum. Polarities such as chaos and order, closed-form and open-form, muted tones and saturated color, and flatness and the illusion of depth are all understood within the Apollonian/Dionysian context to help us explore the ranges within each of the three representational painting categories, and to demonstrate how the categories relate to one another. We come to see that these types of stylistic choices should not, in and of themselves, call into question a painting’s quality and/or validity, but are rather an expression of the artist’s position along the Apollonian/Dionysian continuum.

Why is it that so many respected and established artists are at each other’s throats over matters as seemingly insignificant as whether a painting had hard edges or softer, more broken up edges? Some painters seem to take the work of others as some kind of a personal affront, as opposed to simply an expression of that specific artist’s painterly preferences. The word “Nazi” is tossed about fast and loose, and sometimes art school critiques turn into high-pitched shriek fests where grown professionals try to prove that a student’s work (and sometimes implicitly the work of that student’s main mentor) is not merely bad; it is invalid.

Every year we hear more and more stories of outrageously unprofessional behavior arising out of aesthetic disagreements. One of my personal favorites happened at a well-known art school. At this school, the main gallery would rotate shows so that each member of the faculty would eventually get a chance to display his or her work. When it came time for one painter, a full professor, to have her show, there was a fuss made at the department meeting. Her work was hard-edged, tonal, and highly detailed. “Is there any way,” a fellow painting professor proposed, “that we could just have a sign displayed in the window letting people know that this kind of work does not represent the institution?”

For decades now, it has been widely asserted that any type of realism (which is in itself a loaded word) is passé, and therefore it has been actively marginalized by many mainstream critics and contemporary art institutions. Established artists and college professors have still been so busy fighting the man and shocking the bourgeoisie that they have not noticed that the anti-academics now were the man. So, when representational painting seems already to have been largely marginalized, why are people working within that tradition also at each other’s throats?

The deeper reasons for this antagonism, and, in fact, the subconscious impulses behind aesthetic choice, become apparent when we look at Nietzsche’s description of the Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic in The Birth of Tragedy. In his book, Nietzsche explains that the form art takes (he specifically deals with Greek tragedies) is in direct relation to Man’s response to reality. He believes that aesthetics address the question of what our response should be to the nature of life.   This, of course, begs the question of how Nietzsche views reality. As he is examining the Greek view in this case, it is a specifically pagan as opposed to a Judeo-Christian point of view. Instead of a single God on high, creating order out of primordial chaos, there are competing gods, with competing moral positions, constantly engaged in various conflicts and endeavors. Nietzsche does not separate aesthetics, ethics, or metaphysics; they remain deeply entangled, for he believes that to separate any from the others is to diminish each. So here we have this pagan worldview: rather than an imposed moral order, we have a moral order that is arising out of competition and interaction. What is reality? Reality is creatures coming into existence, eating, sleeping, fornicating, competing and cooperating, breeding, and expiring, and this chaotic cycle of life continues on and on. Man has developed various means of coping with the ways of nature. While there are more responses than just the Apollonian and the Dionysian, these are the two with which Nietzsche explains the dynamics at play in works of art.

Apollo is the Greek god of dreams, prophecy, medicine, archery, intellectual inquiry, light, and the arts such as music, poetry, and dance. Apollonian qualities in painting include the use of lines, closed form, multiplicity, tonalism, and the impression of stillness. The Apollonian impulse is governed by the rational mind which makes divisions in order to grasp meaning. In contemporary thought, we tend to think of these qualities as more left-brained, although recent research shows that the halves of the brain are much more interrelated than previously supposed.[1] Nietzsche equates the Apollonian to the world of dreams, which no matter how compelling or seemingly immersive, is ultimately illusionary. “The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds,” Nietzsche asserts, “in the creation of which every man is a consummate artist, is the precondition of all visual art….We take pleasure in the immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary.”[2] Thus, Nietzsche’s Apollonian Man copes with the reality of the chaos of being by restructuring it into an illusory vessel of meaning. The artworks resulting from this coping mechanism permit an interpretation of life as well as a training ground in which the conflicts of life can play out.

Dionysus, another son of Zeus, is also a Greek god of art, but more associated with theatre. He is the god of wine and intoxication, agriculture, the fertility of nature, and of the ecstatic worship and secret rites of mystery religions. Dionysian qualities in painting include emphasis on the materiality of the paint (painterliness), open form, a sense of wholeness, colorist painting, and the impression of movement. We can think of these traits as the right-brained counterparts of the Apollonian qualities. The Dionysian is impulse governed by the emotional mind which responds to the chaotic flux of being not by resisting it but by mimicking that reality—in a sense, by becoming a part of it. Rather than to fight nature, the goal becomes to harness its creative power.

To help us understand these competing dynamics, Nietzsche turns to a parable from Schopenhauer of Man enveloped in the veil of Maya.

“Just as the boatman sits in his little boat, trusting to his fragile craft in a stormy sea which, boundless in every direction, rises and falls in howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuationis.”[3]

The principium individuationis, or the principle of individuation, describes the way in which any specific thing is distinguished from other things. For instance, I see the laptop on which I am writing as distinct from the table on which is it sitting. In the same way, the principle of individuation can allow me to see myself as a person who is separate from you, and thus I can relate to you on that basis. I am I, you are you, the chair upon which I sit remains a chair, and thus I can relax that all is right with the world. Nietzsche proposes that “we might even describe Apollo as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, from whose gestures and looks all the delight, wisdom and beauty of ‘illusion’ speak to us.”[4] Schopenhauer goes on to describe how this comforting world of appearances might be cracked at times (if not ultimately shattered) when Man, with tremendous dread, is confronted with the underlying chaos of existence. This dread goes hand-in-hand with a state of blissful ecstasy, welling up from the reunification of Man with Nature. This state is the Dionysian aspect, as Nietzsche puts it: the world of intoxication as opposed to the world of dreams. This is the dreadful bliss of the maenads in their orgiastic frenzies of the worship of Dionysus, of dancers hypnotically losing themselves in the rhythmic pounding in the depths of the nightclub, of the intoxicating drumbeat of the rituals of aboriginal peoples, and of the feelings of oneness and bliss that can be attained through either meditation or riding a chemical high. The line between catastrophe and deepest bliss is one that is often blurred.

Perhaps the most immediately visible difference between Apollonian and Dionysian painting is that the former tends to be linear while the latter tends to be painterly. The first sees in terms of lines while the second sees in masses. In his Principles of Art History, Heinrich Wölfflin defined this contrast as follows:

“Linear vision, therefore, means that the sense and beauty of things is first sought in the outline—interior forms have their outline too—that the eye is led along the boundaries and induced to feel along the edges, where seeing in masses takes place where the attention withdraws from the edges, where the outline has become more or less indifferent to the eye as the path of vision, and the primary element of the impression is things seen as patches.”[5]

Usually, more linear painting also tends to be closed form as opposed to open form. The edge around forms is kept whole, and the principium individuationis holds sway, so that each object remains clearly defined as itself, and there is a clarity to its relationship to its neighbor as well as to the entirety of the elements in the composition. Open form paintings fit more into the realm of the Dionysian, where edges start to blur, rupture, and disintegrate, and the emphasis shifts from the specific to the general. Individual identity becomes less important than the entirety of the picture plane, the sense of the gestalt. With fewer edges on which our eye can catch, we zip around the painting at greater speed, creating a sense of motion and dynamism in the experience of viewing the work of art.

Motion and emotion are visually tied. More linear and closed-form paintings tend to have a quieter sort of reverie about them. The experience of vision can feel more detached, as if we observe the scene from a critical distance. As viewers, we enter the realm of analysis and objectivity. More painterly and open-form work, on the other hand, hints at exuberance. The experience of viewing becomes more immersive. The line between the viewer and the painting, just like the boundaries between depicted objects, starts to disintegrate. Wölfflin sees this shift to the painterly from the linear as “the distinguishing feature of the 17^th century in comparison with the 16^th.”[6] During this era, Renaissance art transitioned to the new dominant style of the Baroque. The Renaissance, of course, was deeply rooted in the rediscovery of classical Greek art and heavily influenced by the aesthetic ideas of Plato. Thus, in the depiction of each object or human figure, artists strove for a representation of an ideal form. Whereas art during the Renaissance strove for perfect proportion, with each form developed fully within itself while still interacting with the whole, Wölfflin describes a different set of goals in Italian Baroque art. “The relationships of the individual to the world has changed, a new domain of feeling has opened, the soul aspires to dissolution in the sublimity of the huge, the infinite.”[7]

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Jacob Collins Anna 2004,John Dubrow Tine 2009,Alan Feltus What Thoughts Do They Hide 2010-11

So how does contemporary representational painting relate to these dichotomies? I propose that representational painting today can be divided into three broadly-conceived categories: Classical, Observational, and Constructed. While fluid, these categories are useful to describe significant differences in both the appearance of paintings and the ways in which painters tend to think of their own work and that of others. Naturally, the work of many painters is a combination of two or even all three of these categories. Sometimes the same painter will have distinct bodies of work that may each fit into different categories. Oftentimes, the work of gifted painters is overlooked when it is not able to be neatly categorized by curators or critics who may not properly appreciate the complex ways in which these categories overlap in the given work. Looking more deeply into these categories can also help us to appreciate that work which straddles the lines. The analysis of where the work within these categories lies upon the Apollonian/Dionysian continuum can shed tremendous light on both the nature of the work and on the sometimes puzzling reactions that members of one camp can display toward the work of another.

Contemporary classical painting, also sometimes referred to as academic painting, embraces and attempts to build upon painting traditions of the past. Much of classical painting in America today is found in the growing atelier system, which traces its roots back to the height of the French Academy in the 19^th-century, looking back at painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Carolus-Duran. Classical painters often see themselves as working to revive lost knowledge, rooted in traditional materials and tools, with an emphasis on technical skill as it relates to crafting a compelling illusion of realistic form and space and the pursuit of an ideal of beauty. Classical paintings are more likely to be painted indirectly, utilizing techniques such as monochromatic underpainting, glazing, and scumbling. Unlike much of the contemporary art world, classical painting often eagerly engages with issues of narrative. Thus, classical painting presents a more Apollonian vision of the world, with a time-honored way of structuring a painting that makes the illusion both believable and seductive. Such paintings frequently deal with allegory or the more outright depiction of a situation, lending themselves to the act of interpretation, and telling a story that has a point. Classical painting takes our fragmented reality and brings it into aesthetic harmony.

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Jacob Collins Candace Profile 2004,Daniel Sprick Sherry 2012,Odd Nerdrum Self portrait at L’Hippodrome
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While classical painting as a whole tends to sit closer to the Apollonian side of the spectrum, there is a range within it that can be further explored. On the more Apollonian end of classical painting we can identify a painter such as Jacob Collins. Populating Collin’s figure paintings, nude models either lounge in bed, visually supported by artfully draped sheets, or contrast against a simple, airy wall. Most demurely look away from the viewer, offering themselves up for our viewing pleasure, ripe fodder for the ubiquitous critiques of the male gaze. The figures tend to be lit at the traditional forty-five degree angle. This controlled lighting situation, with that specific angle, has been used historically in painting because it provides great clarity in the depiction of form and space. Values are more easily broken down into highlight, light mass, midtone, coreshadow, and reflected light. Thus a systematic understanding of light is applied and a believable space is created that simultaneously describes the scene in front of the painter and harkens back to centuries of tradition. The colors tend to be lower in saturation while organized into a clear value hierarchy (tonalist painting) and the figures are highly rendered with exquisite detail. While the edges are not by any means harsh, these are clearly examples of closed form paintings. The angle of the lighting, the highly rendered details, and the closed edges all contribute to the individuation of the motif’s constituent parts.

Further along the spectrum towards the Dionysian, we find the work of Daniel Sprick. We are immediately more aware of the materiality of the paint, breaking the form here and there with splashes and drips. The paint becomes a more active, sensuous player in our visual experience, as we delight in its multiplicity of forms. While still classically lit, the figure is now enveloped in a glowing, numinous space that cannot be concretely tied to any specific physical location. We are somehow left with the impression that the sense of motion in the external environment is connected to the emotional state of mind of the model. There is no longer such a clear division between positive and negative space. Color from the flesh of the model intrudes into the space and the space likewise pushes into the model. With the more open form, our attention shifts from the particular to the overall composition, before coming back to indulge in the delicate rendering of the human form.

On the Dionysian end of classical painting, we encounter the work of Odd Nerdrum. Nerdrum’s subject matter tends to be more abrasive, often even shocking to more traditional viewers. Many of his paintings seem to tell a story or allegorically depict some of the less comforting aspects of the human condition. Nerdrum has embraced the term kitsch, used by his critics to deride the high level of drama and emotion in his subject matter. The paint is built up more thickly than in either Collins’ or Sprick’s work. Looking closely at the surface, one can see lower layers of paint peeking through, creating a rough, textured tapestry. The work remains tonalist, but glints of brighter colors surprise the eye. The lighting situation is no longer clear-cut; the glow feels more tied to mood and composition than to a closely observed, specific visual situation. The painting is more open form, with groupings of similar value and color taking our eyes off of the edges of depicted objects and sweeping us across the composition in broad movements. Air begins to take precedence over object.

With all of these Dionysian features, how do we know that Nerdrum’s work still fits under the classical painting grouping? There is first that narrative aspect, more present in his work than in that of Collins or Sprick. Then there is the matter of painting style that is inherited from tradition; Nerdrum’s paint application is very clearly akin to that of Rembrandt. With the rise of modernism, art criticism has put the onus on the artist to embody the meaning of the painting in the manipulation of the medium, calling for an invented rather than an inherited language of paint. Critics of classical painting view those painters as living in a kind of time capsule—rejecting the whole of modernism and post-modernism and indulging in a visual form of nostalgia.

The second category that we are exploring is observational painting. The term observational is often interchanged with the word perceptual. The idea is that these works are all rooted in the act of looking and responding to the motif. Of course, in classical painting, the artists are also often closely observing a scene in front of them, but with observational painting, the act of looking is given primacy. Values in this camp tend to stress a freshness of vision: a vision that is not wholly rooted in previously established artistic conventions. Like in other contemporary art practices, the words conventional and academic are tossed about as insults. This is, of course, not to say that observational painters have completely done away with convention. After all, painting as an activity is a cultural construct, and it cannot really be seen and understood without some sense of its relation to art history. Also, observational painters tend to look at historical painters from a wider time range than do classical painters. Walk into your prototypical observational painter’s studio and you are likely to find monographs from modern painters such as Edwin Dickinson and Giorgio Morandi side by side with books on early Renaissance masters Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, as well as a tome filled with the prehistoric cave paintings from Lascaux. While classical painting tends to be more associated with the atelier movement, observational painting has a strong foothold in various “studio schools” as well larger and older art institutions such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

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Israel Hershberg The Chameleon 1997,Gillian Pederson-Krag Still Life 2007,Jordan WolfsonStill Life with Rosehips and Turquoise Bowl II2011
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On the more Apollonian end of observational painting we have the work of Israel Hershberg. Painters such as Hershberg, with extremely detailed and very much closed-form paintings, are sometimes derided by painters further on the Dionysian side of observational painting as being classical and even reactionary. Hershberg’s use of color in many of his still-lifes tends to be on the less saturated side, his vision of the world held together by a dusty sepia-tinged air. His subject matter tends to be enigmatic and unadorned, eschewing conventions of prettiness. The forms and textured surfaces are depicted in stark detail, revealing the inevitable erosion brought on by the passage of time. The mood is one of felt emotion that is always restrained, always pulsing underneath those scratched and worn and obsessively tended-to surfaces. Unlike many classical paintings, the surface of the painting does not glimmer under a thick layer of varnish. Observational painters are more likely to prefer a matte or semi-matte finish to their work. In part this is because of the nature of the way in which the image is built up. Hershberg, like many other observational painters, employs a mostly direct method of applying paint. He goes for the large color relationships that he sees right from the start of the painting process, rather than building up from a monochromatic underpainting with a series of glazes. I imagine that many of these painters shun a slicker surface because they like the way that a more matte surface looks, but why do so many observational painters seem to lean towards matte while classical painters are more likely to lean towards glossy? I believe that the first reason for this is that contemporary classical painters tend to look more at nineteenth-century French Academy paintings, which were often painted indirectly and finished off with a protective layer of varnish. In contrast, Hershberg looks back at the surfaces of the frescos of the early Renaissance, and even further back to the enigmatic Roman frescos gracing the crumbling walls of Pompeii.

But the division between classical and observational is of course more than just what era of history the painter tends to fetishize. There is also the matter of the painter’s relationship to certain basic tenets of modernism. With the fall of the French Academy and the rise of Impressionism and all of the subsequent “isms” of modern art, illusion (an Apollonian trait) became a feature that was derided. Whereas previously a painting had been conceived of as a window through which a convincingly real scene could be glimpsed, in the twentieth century the idea of flatness, of the importance of the surface of the painting, became a very conscious concern. In his highly influential 1960 essay “Modernist Painting,” critic Clement Greenberg asserted that flatness was the most essential and unique aspect of Modern painting.[8] Painters started deliberately calling attention to the flat nature of the surface of the canvas. Rather than an attempt to build a convincing illusion, the materials and the act of painting itself took center stage. “I’m not trying to sell you a bill of goods,” the painting proclaims. “I am pigment, suspended in a medium, arranged on a flat surface. What you see is what you get.” So, in a subtle nod to Modernism, Hershberg’s dry, fresco-like surfaces delicately draw attention to the flatness of the canvas, creating a tiny spark of conflict between a masterly depiction of deep space and the assertion of flatness.

The further we get towards the side of the Dionysian, the more emphasized the surface qualities tend to be in relation to the illusion of depth. We can see this tendency playing out beautifully when we look at the figure painting by classical painter Jacob Collins side-by-side with that of the observational painter John Dubrow. While the Collins figure is delicately rendered, smoothly guiding our eyes over rounded forms, the Dubrow figure and the surrounding space seem to be composed of starker patches and blocks of paint. The paint never fully gives over its own identity in the service of depiction. While there is certainly depth and space created in Dubrow’s painting, it sits in a delicious tension with the painterly, flat patches that cry out their own materiality. “You see,” the patches exclaim, “this scene we are showing you…it is just an illusion. We are all made of the same stuff as the rest of nature, and it and we are filled with eruptions and negations.” And the illusion of Maya ruptures a bit more.

Further toward the Dionysian pole under observational painting, we have the jewel-toned arrangements of Gillian Pederson-Krag. There are three main ways in which Pederson-Krag’s still-life is more Dionysian than that of Israel Hershberg: use of color, composition, and level of detail. Unlike the strongly tonal, low saturation colors in Hershberg’s painting, Pederson-Krag’s painting glows with vibrant, saturated color. The colors are still held together in a clear value structure, and of course certain areas of the painting have less saturated colors for compositional purposes, but the difference in saturation between the two paintings is clear. The psychology of color has been extensively studied and written about, and higher saturation in color is generally linked to more intense expression of emotion. While both still-lifes have a strong centrally focused composition, with the most intricate and attention catching objects placed right in the middle of the canvas, Pederson-Krag’s painting makes use of layers and rhythmic elements that move the viewer’s eyes more actively throughout the entire composition. If Hershberg’s painting has a lead actor (the dried chameleon) carrying most of the dialogue with a Greek chorus (the delicately textured surrounding surfaces) murmuring their support from afar, then Pederson-Krag’s painting has a main player that is constantly interacting with a more fleshed-out supporting cast. Our eye gets drawn from the bright colors of the flowers down into the highly value-contrasting rhythms of the folded and layered paper. The eye is caught for a moment on the playful glints of the seashells before rising up to the background progression of silent dancers, which carry the movement across the painting to the right, at which point we drop back down to the delicate swirl of the shell on the bottom right. Thus we have the contrast between focusing in on a central object (Apollonian) and the dispersion of a greater amount of attention to the entirety of the composition (Dionysian). Even though all observational painters are incredibly engaged with the act of looking at and responding to the motif, there is always a tremendous amount of editing and ordering that is taking place while painting. Each painter decides the level of detail to include or omit from the painting. Hershberg’s greater intricacy of detail puts the emphasis on the parts and their individuation, while Pederson-Krag’s stronger simplification of spots of color once again shifts the focus from the individual parts to their relationships, their interactions, within the whole.

These aforementioned shifts toward the Dionysian in Pederson-Krag’s work become even more extreme in the painting of Jordan Wolfson. The three primary colors—yellow, red, and blue—are more forcefully stated within the arrangement. There is no single, centrally placed object that is the main player on the stage: rather, we are clearly dealing with an ensemble cast. Closed form gives way to open form, with edges that are crumbling and in some places almost entirely disappear. All this contributes to a great sense of motion, with Wolfson leading our eyes in a mad, Bacchanalian dance across the richly pulsating surface. Negative space and positive space start to run together and the individual depicted objects vibrate to the tune of the chaotic flux of being.

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William Bailey Still Life Hotel Raphael 1985 (Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Betty Cuningham Gallery New York),Randall Exon Beach House 2008,Kyle Staver Europa and the Flying Fish 2011
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In the final category, constructed painting, artists rely more on pictorial invention or working from memory rather than a close observation of a scene in front of them. William Bailey’s tranquil still-life lies on the Apollonian end of the spectrum. At first glance, the vessels that he uses have such compelling presences that it is difficult to believe that he is not looking at them as he paints them. In fact, each of the objects does exist in real life, but Bailey knows them so well that he is able to call them up from memory to act as players on his wholly invented stage. In addition to the crisp edges and desaturated colors that connect Bailey to other painters with more Apollonian features, Bailey has a very interesting way that he deals with perspective. Like the figures in Balthus’ Figure in Front of a Mantel and Euan Uglow’s Nude, 12 Vertical Positions from the Eye, each part of Bailey’s vessels is seen at eyelevel. If the vessels were actually painting according to an observed perspective, then ellipses would be visible at any point above or below the line of sight. Instead, all of Bailey’s objects have straight lines in the place where we would see an ellipse. This sends a very specific message to our brains. The closer we are to a vessel in real life, the greater the effects of perspective would appear, with a correspondingly greater change in the pitch of the ellipses. Conversely, the further the object is from us, the more all of the ellipses would resemble a straight line. As the object approaches the horizon, ellipses are converted to lines. This makes it appear as though Bailey’s vessels are being seen from a great distance, and thus they take on an air of monumentality. We see them as intimate vessels and at the same time our brain reads them as possessing the immensity of the Egyptian Pyramids. The impression is to infuse the paintings with a grandeur that links them to the great architectural achievements of mankind—these pinnacles of the Apollonian drive.

Bailey’s work is not about finding precise color relationships or accurately recording a visual experience; it is much more focused on the internal art historical dialogue that takes place for him while he paints. The colors he employs are the earthy hues of Italy, influenced by the four months of the year that he spends at his home in Umbria. When asked about the serene sense about his work and about whether he is in a transcendent or mystical state while at work, Bailey replied:

I don’t think it’s mystical. When my work changed around 1960, I was thinking, “There’s so much noise in contemporary art. So much gesture.” I realized it wasn’t my natural bent to make a lot of noise and I’m not very good at rhetorical gesture. So this came on a little gradually. With the egg paintings, I started thinking about time and slowing the paintings down and allowing relationships to develop in time and somehow the time I spent in developing those relationships was reflected in the way the image was read. It wasn’t read quickly because it wasn’t painted quickly, and the relationships didn’t reveal themselves easily because they weren’t arrived at easily. And it’s that complication I think that got into the work. The paintings that I know, that I admire like Piero [della Francesca], have that quality, that silence. I’m sure that’s gotten into the work, but I don’t have a formula for it.[9]

Like the observational painters, Bailey distances himself from the classicists by emphasizing the lack of formula in his painting process. The idea, again, is that the pictorial language is one that is invented rather than completely inherited.

Of course, as is the case with each contemporary painter whom I mention in this paper, personal style is an outgrowth of individual temperament as distilled through encounters with art history. The amount to which a language is inherited or invented is always on a sliding scale—it is never purely one or the other. But a dividing point between classical painters and the other two categories is the amount to which the language is inherited, and that is not always the clearest distinction to make. Sometimes painters see themselves as belonging to one camp while other observers may group them with a completely different one. Painters are often wary of labels, and rightly so (especially if said labels serve to limit rather than to deepen our understanding of their work), but when they perceive that their work is being misunderstood to the extent that it is being mislabeled, hackles get raised and we start to see some of the reasoning behind their impassioned responses to work being done in one of the other camps—the better to distance themselves from labels that they find unappealing.

In addition to grappling with art history, painters often are in dialogue with their own personal history. This is the case with Randall Exon’s painting, positioned at a midway point between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in the constructed painting category. His artist statement on his website lays out his goals very clearly:

In his paintings, Exon is interested in the ways in which memory and dreams inform us about the past. Evocation is his primary goal as a “realist,” rather than accuracy. Most of his paintings are fictions made up entirely from collected sources and/or personal experience and memory.[10]

When he was a child living in Kansas, a tornado completely demolished his family home as he sheltered beneath it. He has since developed a large body of work, including the painting shown here, where he recreated an idealized house from his memory and imagination—a house that exists only within his creative work. Exon’s focus on dreams and on rebuilding that which was lost are clearly Apollonian ambitions. His work also tends to be tonalist in nature, with a clear value structure and with color being more tied to evocation and memory than to an experience of observed color in life. But his edges are not as clean and tight as those of William Bailey and the direction of the light is not always as clear, with shadows sometimes functioning more as emotional presences than as formal devices. Through the open windows we are confronted with ominous storm clouds, quietly threatening our Apollonian haven with the specter of external chaos.

Finally, on the Dionysian end of constructed painting we have the work of Kyle Staver. While the subject matter directly quotes from Greek mythology, the pictorial language she uses is very much her own. The figures are painted in a way that is almost cartoonish, yet they are bathed in a silvery, elusive moonlight, which conjures up images of barely glimpsed dances in the thick of forested night. This is not Apollo’s clear light of day, but rather the slipping light of the Dionysian mystery religions. In contrast to William Bailey’s rational grid of vertical and horizontals, Staver’s painting is filled with leaping diagonals that sweep the viewer’s eye on a rollercoaster ride from end to end of her massive painting. The very moments that she depicts are wrought with charged emotion, with the promise of either ecstasy or devastation just around the corner. In his Huffington Post article, Daniel Maidman compares Staver’s view of the myth-image to the more rational, structured, and glossy versions, such as the paintings of nineteenth century English painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema:

We discover that one form of knowledge precludes another, that to know all things born of brightness and identification is to forget things born of darkness and mystery….The myth-image cannot be resolved; we cannot touch the face of Zeus as we can those of our human brothers. Sunlight does not make his features clear. There is a light that lights him, but we do not have the eyes to see that light….One solution is to paint the gods as mortals see them. How do mortals see them? Indistinctly and murkily, by moonlight, with the aspect of a rustle among the leaves or a burst of feathers. A thing blurs past us, and by the time we turn to look at it, it is gone. This is how Kyle Staver paints the myths.[11]

Kyle Staver also uses an indirect manner of painting (glazing, scumbling, and so forth) which is usually associated with classical painters, but her usage is less structured and more about activating the entire surface in an engaging and varied manner. She also uses storytelling in her paintings, which we associate with the Apollonian, but we are somehow convinced that her paintings are less about a story that seems to have a point, and more about the visceral, sensual experience of that specific moment.

What we see is that the division into the three categories of classical, observational, and constructed is very fluid. While there are clearly identifiable tendencies within each group, traits that are ascribed to one group also often show up in others, but to different extents…and they are often used to different ends. Flattening her space like a true modernist, Kyle Staver also glazes. Deeply committed to the act of observation, Israel Hershberg will also move the table stains about on his surfaces, better to serve the composition. Working within an inherited tradition and fully aware of his indebtedness to his painterly predecessors, Daniel Sprick’s paintings are nevertheless so very clearly his own.

Sadie Valerie, The Wave, 2010, Classical, Apollonian

Why is there much vitriol between painters in these different camps and between Apollonian and Dionysian painters within the same category? On some level, the divide is a religious one. Apollonian painting, and especially classical painting, tends to be associated with more conservative beliefs that emphasize the importance of traditions passed down over countless generations and a life that is involved with established religious institutions and norms.

Robert Liberace, John with Sheepskin, Classical,
Dionysian

Towards the Dionysian side of the spectrum, one finds the mistrust of institutions and received modes of worship, and an emphasis on individual exploration and experience. Similarly, people often jump to political assumptions based on viewing a particular style of painting. Since a more classical and prescribed approach was often utilized by totalitarian regimes (both on the right and the left ends of the political spectrum), painters who favor a more Apollonian style are often accused of simplemindedly, or even maliciously, toeing a party line. On the other hand, painters of a more Dionysian bent can be accused of being untaught, lazy, or even anarchists. And thus contemporary painting becomes a battlefield on which religious, social, and political forces are played out, with gross generalizations bandied about. People jump to oversimplifications, essentializations, and sometimes, discourse that amounts to nothing more than belligerent name-calling.

Mike East, Cigarettes and Marissa’s Bowl, 2009.
Observational, Apollonian

On a basic level, we are clannish creatures, and we naturally like to think that our way of doing something is the right way of doing something, because it justifies our own decisions. Recent research in neuroaesthetics establishes that the brain’s default mode network (DMN), the part of the brain which is highly associated with personal identity, becomes activated when the subject is viewing those particular artworks which that individual finds most meaningful.[12]   The DMN is usually activated during introspection, and is not typically active when an individual is engaged in the outside world…and this includes viewing paintings that do not produce a strong sense of resonance. Thus, current scientific findings confirm what painters have always known: that the language of paint which calls to us most insistently is inextricably linked to our deepest sense of self. In the case of painters, there is an immense amount of time, effort, and psychic energy that goes into the creation of a body of work. It is a truism that when one is not secure in one’s sense of self, a competing vision of the world seems like a personal challenge rather than a fellow traveler’s unique contribution to the rich tapestry that is contemporary painting.

Susan Jane Walp, Nuts in a White Cup with Brick, Pine
Cone, Xerox and Clothespin, 2008. Observational, mixed
Apollonian/Dionysian. Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

The divide between the Apollonian and the Dionysian represents different urges, both within our society and within ourselves. Historically, these two opposing forces have worked in concert to create civilization and art as we know it. The clarity of the Renaissance, an Apollonian rediscovery and resurrection of the lost artistic knowledge of Classical Greece, was followed by the Dionysian passion of Baroque art. Out of the Baroque rose highly structured Neoclassicism, peaking at the height of the French Academy. And remember that the impressionists, those textbook Dionysian iconoclasts, first rebelled against that Apollonian French Academy—and the impressionists were known for nothing if not breaking down forms and edges (and replacing high-brow subject matter, such as religious themes and classical myths, with more contemporary and unglamorous depictions of urban life). But the Apollonian could not be eradicated, and we are seeing its resurgence now in the greatly renewed interest in both observational painting and in classicism. There are thus great historical cycles within the world of representational art. Apollonian knowledge is lost due to an upsurge of the Dionysian element, during which time the Apollonian becomes occult—it goes into hiding—only to be revived into a great flourishing under the sun once again. The Dionysian upsurge beneficially renews the stale qualities and dogmatic rigidity that, after a while, become sour. Apollo, left to his own devices, becomes stagnant, self-referential, and infatuated with his own perfected sense of order. That is the time for Dionysus and his followers to rage through Apollo’s tidy world, with all the destructive power of their intoxicated orgy, and set the deadwood ablaze to reduce the glorious and bloated construction of culture into unifying and obliterating ash—from which, in time, new seedlings might erupt. During these occulted periods of Apollonian activity under Dionysian sway, the knowledge is refined, misunderstood, and (as a result of that misunderstanding of prior dogmas) creatively reconstructed in a way that allows for the generation of new life. The continuum of the Apollonian and the Dionysian becomes the body of the ouroboros—cyclically eating itself and regenerating through the annals of time.

Ann Gale, Babs with Ribbons, 2008. Observational, Dionysian

My hope in exploring these categories and the wide range of Apollonian and Dionysian traits contained in each one is to show that choices of painting style, that visual predilections and affinities, directly result from our deeply rooted response to the chaos inherent in life, and the civilizing forces which struggle to make sense of it. No art can exist without the interrelation of the conflicting tendencies of resisting or embracing the chaos. Nietzsche asserts that Greek tragedy at its artistic height actually fuses these forces together. He believes that the greatest works of art are those in which the conflicting forces are perfectly pitched in creative balance.

We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have succeeded in perceiving directly, and not only through logical reasoning, that art derives its continuous development from the duality of the Apolline and Dionysiac; just as the reproduction of species depend on the duality of the sexes, with its constant conflicts and only periodically intervening reconciliations.[13]

Alan Feltus, Gallery Tea, 1991. Constructed, Apollonian

Whether we are discussing a specific painting, or the entirety of the journey of art through history, progress and renewal are achieved through this battle of the gods. The Apollonian drive brings the possibility of wholeness and balance to our fragmented existence. But with time and institutionalization, Apollo can become self-satisfied—bloated with his own importance—and then only Dionysus can come through to destroy that which has become stagnant, and reunite Man with his essential nature, the source of both his deepest terror and his most profound bliss.

Susan Lichtman, Family at Sundown, 2005 Constructed, Dionysian

With representational painting having been marginalized for so long as too unhip for the contemporary scene, in its current energetic resurgence, may we spend less time arguing the validity of one approach over another, but rather revel in the tremendous accomplishments that can be found within the rich field of painterly choice that lies open to us. Successful work in each category can lie anywhere within the range of the Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic. We see that Apollonian and Dionysian traits can take a myriad of forms within a single painting, and that every individual painter is responsible for finding the unique way in which these forces are pitched in his or her art. It is the suspended tension of both Apollo and Dionysus within a single work of art that can elevate a painting from simply competent to startlingly and poetically alive.

[1] M. Rogers, “Researchers debunk myth of “right brain” and “left-brain” personality trait.” (Online: University of Utah, Office of Public Affairs. 2013). Retrieved Feb. 22, 2014, from http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0071275

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche (Shaun Whiteside, trans.), The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 15.

[3] Arthur Schopenhauer (E.F.J. Payne, trans.), The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 352.

[4] Nietzsche,16

[5] Heinrich Wölfflin (M.D. Hottinger, trans.), Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art” (New York: Dover Books, 1950), 18. This edition is an unabridged and unaltered reprint of Hottinger’s 1932 translation of Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Berlin: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1932).

[6] Idem., 11.

[7] Idem., 10.

[8] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Forum Lectures (Washington, D.C.: Voice of America, 1960).

[9] Dorie Baker, “The ‘made up’ world of artist William Bailey” (Online: Yale News, Dec. 10, 2010). Retrieved Feb. 24, 2014 from http://news.yale.edu/2010/12/10/made-world-artist-william-bailey.

[10] Randall Exon, “About the Artist” (Online: Randall Exon, 2010). Retrieved Feb. 24, 2014 from http://randallexon.com/Abouttheartist.html.

[11] Daniel Maidman, “Theophany: Kyle Staver’s Greek Myth Paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery” (Online: Huffington Post, Oct. 16, 2013). Retrieved Feb. 25, 2014 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-maidman/theophany-kyle-stavers-gr_b_4102690.html.

[12] Allison Meier, “Neuroaesthetic Research Probes Link Between Art, Perception, and the Self” (Online: Hyperallergic, Jan. 23, 2014). Retrieved Feb. 25, 2014 from http://hyperallergic.com/104767/neuroaesthetic-research-probes-link-between-art-perception-and-the-self/.

[13] Nietzsche, 14.

The post Apollo and Dionysus in the Representational Painting Family Feud appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

This is the first article for the new section on materials and technique, “Sounding Technical”. The first thing I need to say is that I’m no expert about the technical aspects of painting. What I hope to offer is a non-partisan centralized source of knowledge and opinion to help in the learning and promotion of sound painting principles.

Naturally there are many resources online to learn about specific technical concerns related to painting, too many resources actually, I’d like to find and share the most useful and informative sites related to the issue focused on. My focus will generally not be to advocate any particular method but rather look at the best arguments from differing opinions about any one subject. Eventually, I’d also like to hold interviews with painters and others about specific technical issues as well as encouraging guest writers to speak on a technical matter when possible.

Practical, sound advice is all well and good but I also relish reading about the controversial, the offbeat, and the contrarian points of view. I’d like to offer topics that incites or inspires discussion. Many times when I’m reading online Op-Ed columns the comments are often more interesting than the article itself. I’m certain that many readers here hold a vast knowledge base as well as strong opinions,if shared, could offer an important resource for painters.

My first article will take a look at some thoughts on varnishing oil paintings both pro and con.

It would be most curious to see the results of a survey showing what percentage of completed contemporary paintings are varnished. My guess is that it would be on the low side. Modernistic oil painting on traditional supports has often sought a less precious, matt, rough or complex surface texture where a shiny varnish could significantly detract from the desired look. Some might even say a glossy varnish makes the painting look too slick or makes the painting difficult to see from the glare. Some painters may fear a varnish might make the painting look too “traditional” or fear the painting won’t been respected enough as a flat surface and the varnish suggests more of a glassy window onto the world rather than the modern notion of a richly textured object covered with colored glue. But all flat object are going to collect dust and face environmental risks that over time will damage the unprotected painting.

On the other hand, many painters prefer the look of the glossy varnish and the way it tends to deepen and saturate the color and appreciate the way it unifies the surface and may not feel the painting looks complete until after varnishing. No doubt there are a wide range of opinion regard the use of varnishing and it is interesting to hear some thoughts both pro and con.

It is commonly written that oil paintings should be varnished anywhere from 6 months to a year after completion, using any number from a wide variety of varnishes in order to protect the paint surface from environmental damage such as smoke, pollution, etc, help even out the surface and eliminating any “sunken-in areas”, restore the “wet” painting look, enhance the vibrancy and unity of the colors and to give “finish” to the painting. (actually varnishing doesn’t really eliminate sunken-in areas or the uneven sheen that results from oil being leeched out of the paint – it will make the sunken-in matt areas more glossy but will also make the glossy areas even more glossy – defeating your purpose. I’ve heard it is better to “oil-out” the sunken in areas long before applying the varnish or better yet to prevent sinking-in by better preparation of the ground. Here is a link to a Winsor-Newton video that discusses dealing with “oiling-out” the “sinking-in” of colors in a painting.

I would venture to guess that most painters today prefer to use the modern synthetic varnishes as they are less apt to yellow or darken, are easier to apply successfully and will allow for relative easy removal with less risk to underlying paint layers. Modern varnishes offer a wide variety of solutions to protect the painting from dust, scratches and other such harm. They also offer a range of finishes from glossy to matt.

Some painters still prefer older varnishes made of organic resins for a number of reasons such as a preference for the look of the aging painting’s patina of an “old master” look such as a fine crackling or they simply prefer materials that have been in use for centuries rather than decades. There are so many sites offering extensive expert information about varnishing so I won’t go into detail with a discussion of specific types, brands and purposes here. I will show a Winsor & Newton and Gamblin you tube video on varnishing that discusses the basics, you may want to avert you gaze from the actual painting he’s varnishing but it does offer some helpful basic information. At the end of the article I’ll also provide a several links to site with specific information related to brands, types of varnishes as well as recipes, etc.

Right now I’m more interested to examine the less discussed case for not varnishing at all and how some important painters since the mid 19th century became adamantly opposed to varnishing, artists such as Cezanne, Monet, Cassatt, Pissarro among many others. Picasso and Braque were oppose to varnishing their paintings for a number of important reasons, primarily aesthetic. Monet and Pissarro abandoned the use of varnish on their work after 1880, but for different reasons: “Pissarro because of his desire for a matte finish; Monet lest it discolor his effects”

The painter and art historian Anthea Callen discusses the politics of varnish at length in a section in her The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity Sadly this amazing book is out of print but there are still used copies available for a price. Note: If you do buy this book please use this link to Amazon, by doing so will help support this site.

This book is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Impressionist techniques written. Her exhaustive research studies all aspects of Impressionist painting that are of great interest to painters who want to know more about the historical context of painting directly from nature. She also has a smaller but popular and still published book, Techniques of the Impressionists

from the publisher:

“Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists’ treatises, colormens’ archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyzes the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of “making” entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of plein air light on figure painting, studio practice, and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real “modernity” of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters’ material practices. Bold brushwork, unpolished, sketchy surfaces, and bright, “primitive” colors were combined with their subject matter—the effects of light, the individual sensation made visible—to establish the modern as visual.”

Here is an embedded version of the free google ebooks version of it, that has significant portions available for reading. Of particular note is the table of contents which is clickable and goes to a partial view of the chapter topic.

From Anthea Callen, The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity

“For the Impressionists, varnish was not applied automatically or arbitrarily to a painting. The physical and optical effects of varnish on the oil paint layer are immediate and irreversible. Not only is mattness replaced by an even, glossy skin but colours are enriched, appearing more saturated, and the paint layer is made more transparent. It also produces a darkening in tone, exaggerating light-dark contrasts, which is exacerbated with age as the varnish yellows, darkens and further distorts the paint layer colours. Varnish was intimately associated with the Academy, with academic practice and fini, and with the false ‘chic’ of the Paris Salons. Rejecting varnish was not just technically sensible, it actively subverted the reactionary ethos of the Academy. In addition to changing a painting’s physical appearance, varnish, and therefore the lack of it, carried an ideological message: the decision not to varnish signaled not only the work’s modernity, but that of the artist, too. A history of the debates around picture varnishing forms the context in which a more detailed analysis of Impressionist paintings can be located. Examining contemporary art criticism, treatises on technique, the opinions of dealers and artists, and the paintings themselves, a pattern of views emerges that gives new significance to the problem of varnish.” …

“The art of Italian painters before Raphael provided an exemplar at once practical and aesthetic to modern painters: newly discovered, the luminosity, chalky bright colour and shallow pictorial space of early Italian painting offered an alternative to the rich, patinated surfaces characteristic of official clair-obscur oil painting. There was, therefore, a politics of varnishing, of gloss versus matt effects – art practice, aesthetics and ideology are intimately linked.”

Vernissage,(Paris), 1866.

Interesting Wiki link on Vernissage

In marking the completion of paintings for display in the official Salon, vernissage was the rite of passage from private to public, from studio to gallery. The glazing of paintings was forbidden at the Salon; varnish, like the regulation gilt frames, was compulsory until the I880s, when the impact of avant-garde methods provoked a change in official practices. In the Academy’s view, varnishing imposed uniformity on the exhibition while simultaneously linking it to a tradition of ‘great art’ of the past – varnished paintings embodied the notion of dignity and nobility in grand art; the picture was set in aspic, embalmed. Varnish on painting, then, carries layers of meaning beyond the pragmatically physical. On both the literal and metaphoric levels, varnish imbues painting with a heightened clarity, unity and coherence. The varnish film seals in the matière of painting, unifies the surface, slicks over its rough edges, its visual inconsistencies, even intentional contradictions; glossing it over, varnish subdues the coarseness of matter and the animated, scattering luminosity characteristic of a rugged, matt surface. Varnish had a normative function: it made vanguard art look more like academic art. Sameness and uniformity were reassuring.

E. H. Gombrich, Dark Varnishes: Variations on a Theme from Pliny, The
Burlington Magazine, Feb., Vol. 104, No. 707, 1962, pp.51-55 [Trapp
no.1962G.1]

From E. H. Gombrich’s essay:

In 1638, Junius made the story available to English readers in his book on The Painting of the
Ancients:

Apelles … who was wont to be very moderate in all things that concerned the Art, because he would not offend the eyes of the spectators with too much cheerefulnesse of gay and flourishing colours, did by an inimitable invention anoint his finished workes with such a thinne kinde of inke or vernish, that it did not onely breake and darken the clearnesse of the glaring colours, but it did likewise preserve them from dust and filth … [p.285]

In 1691, Filippo Baldinucci gave a lecture in the Accademia della Crusca on the subject of ancient and modern painting within the context of the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns. One of the points in favour of the moderns was, for him, the invention of oil painting, and one of his arguments to
prove that the ancients lacked this technique was precisely Pliny’s story. His point is that this technique of toning down excessively luxuriant colours was precisely the one used by Italian Trecento painters who worked in tempera:

… they spread a varnish over their panels which was a certain mixture that gave their pallid paintings a certain effect of greater depth and greater strength and, toning down the bright surface a little, brought it closer to natural appearance.. .

It might be argued that modern painters also use such varnish on their oil paintings, but I would reply that this usage, which only few adopt, does not serve to counteract any shortcomings of oil paintings as such, that is, to give depth to the darks and to tone down the lights more delicately, for oil painting does not stand in need of such aids. It is used rather to remedy some accidental mishap that sometimes occurs because of the priming, mastic or other, which is applied to the canvas, or that originates in the panel or canvas itself, that is, when it attracts the liquid of the oil so strongly that it almost draws it out of the colours and dries them up in some places to such an extent that this accident alters their appearance on the surface. It is then that by use of another fatty substance, that is, by means of the varnish applied where there is too little oil on the surface, one is able to bring out (and this is the salient point) what is already in the oil painting rather than something that is not there at all—which was precisely the effect that the varnish of Apelles achieved to some very small extent.[10] There is nothing in this description of the oil painters’ practice of bringing out a passage that had `sunk in’, which would refute Mr Ruhemann’s contentions. It merely shows how difficult it is to make a hard and fast division between paint and varnish

From a MOMA conservation article about varnishing and Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

“Paintings that have been varnished are also cleaned, or more accurately, devarnished, when the varnish discolors over time and thus distorts the original colors of the painting. Finally, some paintings should not have been varnished at all, and a varnish can compromise the essential aesthetic.” In this case, a painting that may be de-varnished, not to be re-varnished once the cleaning is finished, what steps do you take to help conserve the painting without using varnish?

The presence of the varnish on a painting, which the artist did not intend to be varnished, does not preserve the painting. Indeed it can do much to diminish the essential quality of the painting. To protect the surface of an unvarnished painting from dirt and grime there are, if necessary, a number of things we do. In some cases the paintings are framed with glass or Plexiglas to protect the surface. This not only provides a physical barrier from airborne grime but also provides a buffer against any climactic changes and (in the case of Plexiglas) protection from damaging UV light. In the case of a painting the size of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon we might decide to place a barrier in front of the work to prevent visitors from approaching too closely. Under these circumstances the only treatment necessary would be a routine dusting with a soft brush once a month or so.

Of course 19th and early 20th Century artist who avoided varnishing to preserve the matt appearance didn’t have the variety of modern synthetic varnishes that we have today. Unless the paintings is protected with a varnish layer or some other means it will collect dirt in the interstices, which can rarely if ever be removed without damaging the paint layer. Dusty, dirty paintings are likely to be particularly problematic in direct painting where impastoed brush marks makes for an uneven, irregular surface where cleaning would be more difficult.

Some painters in order to avoid using a varnish to preserve the matt surface and other reasons have opted for framing their oil paintings behind glass. I’ve read this practice has been particularly prevalent in Great Britain. With new picture glasses on the market such as Museum Glass and it’s anti-glare properties perhaps make this solution even more appealing if not for the high-cost. Especially for larger paintings where the weight of the glass also becomes a major factor.

In our post post-modern era, for better or worse, there no longer seem to be any hard and fast rules about techniques such as varnishing. Both abstract and representational painters may have many valid reasons for varnishing or not varnishing. My suggestion in this regard is to make sure your decision is based on the best solution for preserving the look of your work, not varnishing shouldn’t just be a rationalization to avoid the hassle or conversely you varnish just because you heard that is a rule you’re “supposed” to follow.

If you feel strongly about not having a varnish applied for aesthetic reasons then it’s suggested to write on the back of the painting – Do not varnish. Or if you do varnish you can also write when you last varnished and with what type – which will be helpful to anyone in the future wishing to remove and reapply varnish.

Ultimately it is imperative to remember the obvious, but often overlooked, concern that will protect the painting and enhance longevity more than any varnish might offer, is that you make your painting strong enough visually so that people will want to care for it long after you’re gone and to avoid the painting’s death by dumpster.

Comprehensive resource on all things related to varnishing oil paintings from Amien (The Art Materials Information and Education Network) Varnish Forum topics from Amien

Basic info on varnishing from Winsor & Newton

fairly good video from Dick Blick about varnishing but the soundtrack is a little grating!

Video from Gamblin discussing the application of Gamvar and cold-wax medium. (I prefer to use Gamvar when varnishing and I also like the use of the cold-wax medium for a more matt sheen.)

Conservation Wiki article on varnishing

Good article at Spaces Between the Gaps article on Varnishing

The post Thoughts on Varnishing appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

British TV’s Channel Four’s exclusive tour of Lucian Freud’s studio and interview with David Dawson, Freud’s assistant and model for many years, who inherited Freud’s house and studio.

The post Tour of Lucian Freud’s studio appeared first on Painting Perceptions.

(Painting Perceptions gives enormous thanks to Jordan Wolfson for this thoughtful and important essay and greatly appreciates his generous contribution. You can find more of his work and information on his website.) He is also leading a workshop “Painting as Interbeing” – May 5-8, 2014 in Colorado, you can contact him for more here.

Jordan Wolfson, Still Life with Flowers (In Memory of Tamar B.) 2014, oil on linen, 18 x 16 inches
Click here for larger view.

Painting has no real context today.  What I mean by that is that we have no larger story and meaningful myth within which to hold and nurture the activity of painting.

This activity that we call painting, that seems so clearly full of esteem as “Art”, has no place of stable purpose in our contemporary world.  It’s rather arbitrary whether what a painter paints is going to be seen as important or not.  It doesn’t correlate with whether the actual painting is any good—quality is not a mark against it, just not necessarily for it either.  It has much more to do with how well the painter is able to interface with market forces; the galleries, curators, collectors, etc.  That is, it has much more do with the context of the art world, and that has become a very odd context indeed.  Further, given the growing secularization and fragmentation of our society we have no place of purpose and meaning for what we call art, and for what we call painting, as might be found in a more traditional culture where the sense of an overarching story is still intact.  One can still hope to find a niche of the art world that might appreciate what one has to offer, but in terms of really contributing to a larger story the only thing we seem to be able to count on today, the only story with common consensus and shared terms, is the story of financial amount: how much is it worth?  And that doesn’t really measure the value of the thing.  The situation isn’t just possibly personally frustrating, it’s culturally bewildering and deeply saddening.­

Other questions arise when one looks at the state of the world in general – where we seem to be headed.  One doesn’t need to know the latest climate change information, the details of human trafficking, or worldwide poverty to wonder “What the hell am I doing?  The world is burning and I’m sitting in the corner coloring?  What does it matter, one more picture?  What does it matter, one more painter?”  It turns out it does.  And more directly than we might think.  What I would like to present here is a case for the utmost relevance of painting.  The house is burning.  If painting isn’t coloring in the corner, then what is it?  How does it matter?   Is there a way for painting to actually contribute to help heal our world?

The question of the meaning and purpose of painting has a history.  The question of painting’s relevance only came into existence when the fine arts as a cultural category was gradually invented and then solidified in the eighteenth century.  Until then, painting and painters had a clear role and place.  As Larry Shiner delineates so well in The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, painting as an activity of image-making was always clearly imbedded in the cultural and economic needs of European society.  The category of fine art, as a distinct realm of creativity in which paintings were made for their own sake out of the inspiration of creative genius, didn’t become a cultural norm until the eighteenth century.  Before that, although there were steps being made in this direction from the time of the Renaissance, and although concerns of form and beauty were considered and essential, the term “art” as we know and use it didn’t exist.  The vast majority of painters performed tasks that they were assigned through their guilds and through commissions; there was always a purpose and use to the images being made.  The terms of individual creativity and the notion of art for art’s sake didn’t arise until art became separated from craft, the artist separated from artisan, and pleasure separated from utility and then ultimately refined into aesthetics.  The rise of fine arts as a cultural category was inextricably linked to the rise of a market economy, a process of commodification, and a growing middle class.  By the nineteenth century the normative view was that fine art was a separate realm of spiritual sustenance, ostensibly serving no other purpose than its own existence.

Matisse, La Musique, 1910, 102 x 153 inches, Hermitage, St. Petersberg

How we think about painting was and is extremely flexible.  Our cultural attitude towards painting as an aesthetic object that must, first and foremost, exist for its own sake if it is to carry any real power, and that any use to which it is put threatens to harm its integrity, is an attitude with a history.  It’s fluid, not inevitable.  Perhaps the aesthetic power of a painting may be re-contextualized, revealing a larger purpose within a larger story.

Indeed, at the same time that this split in the eighteenth century was growing between craft and art, there was a pushback, a resistance to the stripping of art of purpose. There was an accompanying resistance to the split of art and life, this making of art into a distinct, separate realm with its own aesthetic jurisdiction.  This pushback occurred from the beginning and continues down to our day.  We see this resistance in the examples that Shiner brings: the works and writing of Hogarth, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft.  We can see it continuing in the work of Goya—giving testimony to the horrors of war and violence and injustice, with Manet and the other Impressionists, in their desire to eschew history painting and turn to the everyday life around them.  We see it in the anti-art of Dada and Duchamp, in the 1960s with the developments of Fluxus and the Happenings of Allan Kaprow.  We see it in the work and teaching of Joseph Beuys and the writings of Suzi Gablik, the work of Tim Rollins and the K.O.S., the community based works in Chicago curated by Mary Jane Jacob, the myriad of artists affiliated with the Green Museum, and the real estate development of Theaster Gates.  Whether in the realm of social justice, community building, spirituality or environmental concerns, the claim of art as a pure domain of disinterested aesthetic contemplation has been relentlessly challenged for over two centuries.

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (excerpt)

How is it that we have come to think of art as its own world with no purpose outside of itself?  And if that makes no sense, than how does art function in our culture and civilization at this point?  What are the various purposes for what we call art and which of them might we actually care about?  The period of history in which painting had ostensibly no utility beyond the aesthetic is short, a gradual transitioning of two to three hundred years.  Painting served various purposes before the onset of the realm of fine arts and it will continue to serve various purposes after the end of art as well.  When I write of “the end of art” I mean the end of the story of art that we’ve been telling culturally, a narrative of sequential style that has viewed the long history of human making through the lens of the last two hundred years.  Arthur Danto and Hans Belting have both written about this and come to similar conclusions independently: the story of art as we have known it is coming to a close.  Larry Shiner, in his book, also speaks of this closure and asks what will be next.

Piero della Francesca, The Nativity, 1470-75, 124.4×122.6cm, National Gallery, London

Before turning to try to answer that question let us first look at the possible uses that art has been put to, even during the period of history in which art was defined as necessarily having no utility, and up through today.  Indeed, art does function as an opportunity for refined contemplative experience, and that is part of why we love it.  It also functions as entertainment and distraction.  It functions as decoration.  It functions as philosophical inquiry.  It functions as social action, as environmental action, as an inquiry into, and protest against racism, sexism and inequality and injustice of all sorts.  It functions as financial investment, as a badge of social and class status, as a badge of cultural hipness and cool.  It functions as religious icon and symbol and as a focus of contemplative meditation.  Art functions politically, financially, socially, culturally, spiritually.   Clearly, art functions.  Clearly it has use and utility.  We may not always agree to the uses to which an object is being put to use, but that it is done so is simply a fact of our world.

Given all of these various uses there is a function of art that is of particular importance: art carries presence.  But then actually all objects, everything, carries presence.  Nature, places, people—all carry presence.  And there is the category of things made—some of those things we call art, most we don’t.  Is there a difference in presence between art and non-art?  Today, it seems that the quality of presence is not a determining factor of whether something is defined as art or not—the difference is simply the decision to name and claim that this given object is art.  It can be anything.  We have seen since the time of Duchamp that any object, even one that is factory made, can be turned into art by a switch of the mind.

Soutine, Landscape at Ceret, 1920-21, 56x84cm, Tate, London

So, while strong presence is not the defining attribute of contemporary art, we do find throughout history objects that carry strong presence, and no matter the categories of those cultures, we have come to call these objects “Art”.  That is, one of the functions of what we call art throughout time and place has been this imbuing of objects with presence.  And whether the cultural category of fine art will continue or not, the practice of wielding and imbuing presence will carry on.  It is an integral part of what people do.  I believe this aspect of human making, to take raw material and somehow charge it with presence, is one of critical importance and I would like to now look at it more closely.

What is presence?  And how does it get associated with an object?  What is the process with which material gets charged or imbued with it?  How is it that a human being can take colored mud, smear it around on a piece of fabric and end up charging the materials so greatly that it resonates with vitality hundreds of years after the person is long gone?  How is it that a human being can take raw material and form it in such a way that it moves our hearts and quiets our minds?  And what does this have to do with saving the world?

Titian, Saint Jerome in Penitence, 1575, Nuevos Museos, El Escorial, Spain

First, the question of the nature of presence:  The experience of presence is consciousness becoming aware of itself.  Eckhart Tolle writes about presence beautifully in his book The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment:

 Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of it?  Have you listened, truly listened, to the sound of a mountain stream in the forest?  Or to the song of a blackbird at dusk on a quiet summer evening?  To become aware of such things, the mind needs to be still.  You have to put down for a moment your personal baggage of problems, of past and future, as well as all your knowledge; otherwise, you will see but not see, hear but not hear.  Your total presence is required.

Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence.  Whenever and wherever there is beauty, this inner essence shines through somehow.  It only reveals itself to you when you are present.  Could it be that this nameless essence and your presence are one and the same?  Would it be there without your presence?
(Tolle, 1999, 96)

A little further on in the book Tolle defines presence:

When you become conscious of Being, what is really happening is that Being becomes conscious of itself.  When Being becomes conscious of itself—that’s presence.  Since Being, consciousness, and life are synonymous, we could say that presence means consciousness becoming conscious of itself, or life attaining self-consciousness.  But don’t get attached to the words, and don’t make an effort to understand this.  There is nothing that you need to understand before you can become present.
(Tolle, 1999, 98)

One of the gifts of making work, drawing and painting, is the possibility of becoming present—in fact, it’s a key ingredient to making strong, living work.  And one of the gifts of viewing objects of beauty and strong presence is that they stop us still and invite us to become present with them, to meet their presence with our presence. This is a particular gift of all art forms, and perhaps the most important gift.  This is how art awakens us, rekindles, reminds, re-hearts.  We remember that we are alive, that things matter, that life matters.  In this sense, beauty serves as a gateway to presence and sheer meaning.  But what does presence as a function of art have to do with saving the world?  And further, we seem to be talking about art in general, the power of presence that can be found in all making.  Does painting in particular have something to offer that goes beyond the general category of art?

Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #79, 1975, 93 x 81 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art

In an article on Richard Diebenkorn in the New Republic from the September 2013 issue Jed Perl wrote, “Ever since the Renaissance, painting has been the grandest intellectual adventure in the visual arts, a titanic effort to encompass the glorious instability and variability of experience within the stability of a sharply delimited two-dimensional space.”  What Perl is describing here points towards something very specific and profound about the nature of painting.  When he writes of the twin aspects of painting, the stability and instability that paintings exhibit, he is getting to the crux of the matter and may help lead us to the unique contribution and gateway that painting provides.  Painting offers two contradictory experiences.  On the one hand, a painting is a flat two-dimensional object, with its surface texture and color shapes.  On the other hand, a painting offers the possibility of a three-dimensional experience, the illusion of moving into space and discovering form.  Stability and instability.  Fact and imagination.  Actual and fictive.  It is this twin role, and its simultaneity, that gives painting such power.  Real and unreal.  Real and more real.  Painting, through the coexistence of two seemingly opposite experiences, interwoven into an actual unity, may provide the receptive adult the possibility of moving from an experience of fragmentation into an experience of wholeness and integration, not only within oneself but with the world at large.  Boundaries between me and other, between inside and outside, prove to be not quite as firm as previously thought.  This occurs not only because our minds are teased into non-discursive awareness by the shimmering interchange between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional experience; “I see a flat colored surface, no wait, I see a sky and valley  below, no wait—will you look at those marks!”  The experience of wholeness also occurs because the respective completeness of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional is each dependent on the other.  That is, in order for a painting to maintain a consistent three-dimensional arena for the viewer to inhabit, in order for me to visually remain looking at and in the painting as a spatial situation, its two-dimensional composition must be complete—it must hold me visually, and then figuratively.  Conversely, in order for the two-dimensional composition to be complete the marks and design, transitions and edges, must appropriately accommodate the parameters of the given three-dimensional experience, whether that is deep and far-reaching space like a Turner or more shallow as in a Braque, whether full bodied as in a Titian or subtly expansive as in a Matisse.  Clement Greenberg got painting’s essence exactly wrong.  It isn’t the stability of painting’s flatness—its “ineluctable flatness”; it is the inextricable unity of painting’s impossible flatness/fullness, stability/instability, stillness/movement.  This is life.  And this is why painting carries such an extraordinary metaphoric force.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire c. 1887 oil on canvas 26.4 × 36.2 inches Courtauld Institute of Art

Again, this may kindle an extraordinary aliveness and wholeness, but what does it have to do with saving the world?  There is one more component that I would like to add to the mix and then I’ll try to put all the pieces together.  Recently I came across a book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein.  The basic premise is that the world we live in is truly unsustainable.  It isn’t just a mess, it’s on the verge of truly collapsing.  If we are not only going to survive, but also thrive, how are we going to get from here to there?  Eisenstein attempts to find the roots of our situation, what has brought us to this point, and what must change, and it has to do with our story.  That is, we tell ourselves a story about who we are, what is important, how the world works—important questions the answers of which lead us to create our world in a particular way.  He describes our current story and offers an alternative one to help us transition into the more beautiful world we know is possible.  Eisenstein writes:

We live today at a moment of transition between worlds.  The institutions that have borne us through the centuries have lost their vitality; only with increasing self-delusion can we pretend they are sustainable.  Our systems of money, politics, energy, medicine, education, and more are no longer delivering the benefits they once did (or seemed to).  Their Utopian promise, so inspiring a century ago, recedes further every year.  Millions of us know this; more and more, we hardly bother to pretend otherwise.  Yet we seem helpless to change, helpless even to stop participating in industrial civilization’s rush over the cliff.

Francisco de Goya, The Colossus 1808–1812 Oil on canvas (46 × 41 in) Museo del Prado, Madrid

I have in my earlier work offered a reframing of this process, seeing human cultural evolution as a story of growth, followed by crisis, followed by breakdown, followed by a renaissance: the emergence of a new kind of civilization, an Age of Reunion to follow the Age of Separation.  Perhaps profound change happens only through collapse. (Eisenstein, 2013, 3)

He goes on:

What do I mean by a “transition between worlds”? At bottom of our civilization lies a story, a mythology.  I call it the Story of the World or the Story of the People—a matrix of narratives, agreements, and symbolic systems that comprises the answers our culture offers to life’s most basic questions: Who am I? Why do things happen?  What is the purpose of life?  What is human nature? What is sacred?  Who are we as a people?  Where did we come from and where are we going? (Eisenstein, 2013, 3)

Eisenstein describes for a few pages what he believes are our civilization’s answers to those questions and then precedes to offer an alternative of “interbeing”:

Here are some of the principles of the new story.  That my being partakes of your being and that of all beings.  This goes beyond interdependency—our very existence is relational.  That,  therefore, what  we do to another, we do to ourselves.  That each of us has a unique and necessary gift to give the world.  That the purpose of life is to express our gifts.  That every act is significant and has an effect on the cosmos.  That we are fundamentally unseparate from each other, from all beings, and from the universe.  That every person we encounter and every experience we have mirrors something in ourselves.  That humanity is meant to join fully the tribe of all life on Earth, offering our uniquely human gifts toward the well-being and development of the whole.  That purpose, consciousness, and intelligence are innate properties of matter and the universe. (Eisenstein, 2013, 16)

Frank Auerbach J.Y.M. Seated No. 1 1981, 711 x 610 mm Collection of the Tate

Eisenstein explains,

“The fundamental precept of the new story is that we are inseparate from the universe, and our being partakes in the being of everyone and everything else.  Why should we believe this?  Let’s start with the obvious: This interbeing is something we can feel” (Eisenstein, 2013, 16).

We painters know this, and experience this all of the time—it’s why we look at great painting!  Painting directly participates in, enacts and furthers the story of interbeing.  Painting is one way, surely among a myriad of ways, to further this story.  But it is a particularly powerful way that I will try to describe.  And for those of us that paint, painting is our way to lend ourselves to, and help facilitate, the Great Turning, because that is indeed what is happening.

In Eisenstein’s book, he moves through a series of short chapters, exploring various aspects of the situation we are facing.  He has titled the chapters according to their focus, such as Separation, Breakdown, Cynicism, Force, Hope, Naiveté.  Near the end of the book he has a chapter on Story and writes:

We have seen already how so much of what we consider to be real, true, and possible is a consequence of the story that embeds us.  We have seen how the logic of Separation leads ineluctably to despair…We have seen how civilization has been trapped, indeed, in its “own postulates”, its ideology of intensifying control to remedy the failure of control.  We have seen how so many of our efforts to change the world embody the habits of separation, leaving us helpless to avoid replicating the same in endless elaboration.

[T]o exit this trap we must operate from a larger context, a more comprehensive mode of consciousness.  This means not only inhabiting a new story, but also working in the consciousness of story.  If, after all, our civilization is built on a myth, to change our civilization we must change the myth. (Eisenstein, 2013, 213)

Morandi, Still Life, 1954, 26.5x41cm, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Britain

If indeed what is needed to shift our world is a new story, how specifically can painting contribute to a new myth and help tell this new story?  Interbeing is a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, a translation of the words tiep hien.  The word tiep means “being in touch with” and “continuing”.  Hien means “realizing” and “making it here and now.”  When we paint, whether from observation or memory or non-representationally, we have a situation which invites us to “be in touch with”, with what we see, with our inside – ourselves, with our outside – the world in which we live, with the places that slip back and forth between what is inside and what is outside—and to bring these places into our marking, our touch, and put into concrete form these sensations, in paint, “realizing” them, and further — providing others the opportunity to have these sensations slip into their selves.  Painting seems to magically allow one subjectivity to slip into another, one person’s experience to be felt and embodied by another, from the inside!  How can it be that one person may have a sense of another’s experience, somehow made available through dumb, raw material?

Earlier, I spoke of the twin nature of painting as both a two-dimensional reality and a three-dimensional experience.  I would like to add to that and relate that twinning to interbeing.  Our interbeing begins not with our relations with another person, but with ourselves, for we human beings are twin in our apparent nature.  We are constantly and impossibly twinning and splitting in our experience.  We are body and soul—or if you prefer, body and mind.  And our identification with either leaves us incomplete because we are both (and, in our deepest truth, neither).  Here the two-dimensional surface of the painting functions as the fact of our body and the three dimensional experience performs as our soul.  The achievement of great painting, the exquisite integration of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, gives us not just hope that wholeness is possible.  More than that—great painting serves as a reminder, a rekindling, that such is the truth.   Reality is whole.  We are whole; it is only our minds that have slipped and reconstructed away from this awareness.

Monet, Water Lilies (The Clouds), 1903, 29.5 x 41.5 inches, private collection

The degree of availability that a painting presents, the availability of its trans-subjectivity, of our being able to enter into its space, its reality and being, depends on the degree of presence it embodies.  The degree of presence a work embodies depends on how engaged we are when we paint, how much life force goes into the material, the sheer marking and making.  This isn’t stylistic.  It isn’t about closed marking or open marking, realist or abstract.  It’s about life opening.  It isn’t about emotional intensity, or velocity of marking.  Marks can be slow or fast.  It has to do with the amount of inner involvement, life-force, heat, the maker carries in the moment of the making.  That is, the more we as painters bring ourselves into the work, the more open and vulnerable we allow ourselves, the stronger the presence and the more resonant the work, the more the work weaves the world.

Milton Resnick, Saturn, 1976, 97 x 117 inches, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario

Telling a new story isn’t a small thing.  It is the thing.  Painting does have a necessary and ancient function; it isn’t to depict the world—it is to weave the world; or rather, it is to reveal and make visible the actual weave of the world, the weave that already exists.  What does this mean?  When we paint we have the possibility of bringing our selves into the work—bringing our life force into the mark, the material, bringing our actual being, in this very moment, as it is, into our touch and setting free that vibration and energy.  To do this is not easy, although it is simple.  But it means daring to bring our actual selves, as we are, without judgment, into the work.  It is also a risk and challenge to receive work, to open ourselves up to painting as a force from another person, another life, to feel safe enough to receive that force and allow it in.  This also is not easy, although this too is simple.  And we find that when we do open to the given surface that there may be a sense of aesthetic force, perhaps beauty, perhaps sheer presence, a kind of transmission from one person to another through the material.  When we paint we are not simply making images, we are weaving our subjectivities, and we are doing this through the medium of colored mud on a flat surface—dumb material participating in the exchange and heightening of awareness.  Painting is not simply an activity of self expression—it is an activity of interbeing, of our intersubjectivity, of our actual interconnectedness.  Painting reveals this, gives proof to it in its very nature.  We are not who we think we are.  Painting carries the possibility of getting us out of our minds and into an awareness of our being.  That is what occurs when we receive a painting, whether from another’s hands or from our own.  The reality of our experience facing great painting, the power and force of transmission remains a mystery as long as we remain in the story of Separation.  As we dare to allow our minds to enter into the story of Interbeing, painting affirms the larger truth of this new story.  Its essential nature re-storys the world, reimagining who we are and where we are going.  As we paint we have the possibility to not only make an object to look at, but to retell our story.

Berthe Morisot, In the Dining Room, 1875, 61.3x50cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Painting is currently trapped within the category of fine art.  But what if painting isn’t about a picture, isn’t even about an object.  What if painting, actually, is about the interaction between two minds, two hearts, two beings—the painter and the viewer?  What if painting is about a way of coming to the world, a kind of communion?  John Dewey writes in Art as Experience, “In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience.  Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding” (1934, 1).  In other words, there is no work of art outside of our experience; that is where the reality of art is located.  It is an interaction that reveals an inherent interconnectedness, an interbeing that reveals the illusion of separation. If that were our cultural story of painting what would that look like?  What would an exhibition look like?  Would that change the way we paint?  What happens to the fetish of the object?  The possibility of an interlacing communion through the lending of colored earth to human sensation: mud and oil embodying human consciousness.  Rembrandt understood this.

Rembrandt, Self Portrait with Beret and Turned Up Collar, 1659, 33.3 x 26 inches, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Painting isn’t about beauty.  Beauty is about consciousness.  Beauty is a gateway, an adornment and invitation to space.  The space within the painting.  And space is consciousness.  Space is being.  When we paint we are exploring being.  That is why we need the three dimensional illusion—it isn’t an illusion, it is a gateway—to being.  We are experimenting with different ways of being.  See Rembrandt.  Cezanne.  Monet.  Morandi.  Matisse.  Titian.  Piero.  Chardin.  Soutine.  Martin.  De Kooning.  Diebenkorn.  Auerbach.  Kossoff.  Giacometti.  Resnick.  This is what painting has to offer.  It isn’t the object, for God’s sake.  It is being.

I want to be clear that what I am suggesting is not, in my understanding, a new way of looking at painting.  I believe that what I am trying to describe here is actually an ancient way of looking at painting.  Images carry power.  It is only with the rise and development of our secular culture with its accompanying market economy that painting has found itself delegated to a luxury commodity that is devoid of any real use and value in our society beyond sophisticated decoration, investment and chic.  This is not particularly the plight of painting—so much in our culture has been radically reduced to a flattened materialist, financial definition—the logical endpoint in the Story of Separation.  But the act of painting carries much greater power than that.  And we need to re-describe this activity, re-imagine it, in order to sharpen its power and focus; in order for painting to more fully participate and take its place in our global regeneration.

De Kooning, Gotham News, 1955, 69 x 79 inches, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

For many years now, thinking about the great painters of the 19^th and 20^th century, I’ve deeply envied them.  It’s seemed to me that they, Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, de Kooning—they lived at a time when a painter could still believe in painting.  Painting really mattered.  We certainly weren’t inundated with images like we are today, with television, movies, the exponential growth of the internet and the constant deluge of images from our mobile devices—how could images of paintings compete?

I doubt that painting will ever carry again the kind of privileged position that it once had up through the middle of the twentieth century.  But painting does carry enormous importance as a hand-made object, revealing one person’s being to another, and in that revelation furthering the blossoming awareness of our irreducible interconnection and indeed, our interbeing.  The earlier artists and painters of the 19^th and 20^th centuries had a great, eloquent and noble story called Art.  I’m not sure we really have that narrative anymore—certainly not like we did in the past.  But we might just have something greater—called the survival of our planet, the Awakening of Humanity and the Age of Reunion.

We do not, of course, have to believe this.  We may choose to continue to think of painting as a wonderful activity of depiction.  It is!  And there is nothing wrong with that.  But I am suggesting that there is a much larger story taking place and painting has a central, ancient place in the unfolding of that story.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Water Glass and Jug c. 1760 Oil on canvas, 32,5 x 41 cm Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

Painting Perceptions interview with Jordan Wolfson by Elana Haglar.
Sources:

Belting, Hans.  2003.  Art History after Modernism.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Danto, Arthur.  1997. After the End of Art.  Princeton: Princeton University Press

Dewey, John.  1934.  Art as Experience.  New York: Penguin Group

Eisenstein, Charles.  2013.  The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.  Berkeley: North

Atlantic Books

Gablik, Suzi. 1991. The Reenchantment of Art. London: Thames and Hudson

Jacob, Mary Jane. 1998. Conversations at the Castle. Cambridge: The MIT Press

Perl, Jed. “The Rectangular Canvas is Dead.” The New Republic 7 Sept. 2013.

Shiner, Larry.  2001. The Invention of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Thich Nhat Hanh, 1997. Interbeing.  New Dehli: Full Circle Publishing

Tolle, Eckardt.  1999.  The Power of Now.  Vancouver: Namaste Publishing

Winnicott, D.W..1986. Home is Where We Start From. New York: Norton

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This 116 minute Documentary Can also be seen on DVD through Netflix, where the quality is likely better. Unclear how long the youtube video will stay available.

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Giorgio Morandi’s Dust – International Trailer w/English subs from Imago Orbis on Vimeo.

Below is a trailer for a previous documentary on Giorgio Morandi, “I Paesaggi Li Amavo Di Più ” – with some video footage of Morandi himself in this trailer.

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Albers, Josef, b. 1888 d. 1976, was one of the most influential artist-educators of the 20th century, was a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany during the 1920s. In 1933 he came to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design and was professor emeritus of art at Yale until his death in 1976. Joseph Albers was a significant contributor and influence on modern painting.

From his wikipedia page…”Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically. Painting usually on Masonite, he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded colors used on the back of his works.”

Albers is perhaps best known today by art students for his famous book and course of study Interaction of Color Originally issued in 1963 as a limited-edition set of commentary and 150 silkscreened colour plates, the book introduced generations of students, artists, designers, and collectors to Albers’ unique approach to complex principles. A smaller version of the Interaction of Color was published later (1975) and has been a mainstay color bible for generations of art students.

The original publication has long been out of print and is extremely expensive if you could find it at all. However the original silkscreened printing likely have the greatest color fidelity. A the January 2010 reissue of Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition [Hardcover] is considered by many reviewers on Amazon to be a gorgeous book. From the publisher’s blurb… “Lavishly produced as a two-volume slipcased set, this book replicates Albers’ revolutionary exercises, explaining concepts such as colour relativity and vibrating and vanishing boundaries through the use of colour, shape, die-cut forms, and movable flaps that illustrate his astonishing demonstrations of the changing and relative nature of colour. Also included for the first time are new studies from the Albers archive, produced by the artist’s students in the early 1960s. A celebration of Albers’ legendary achievements, this beautiful publication is an essential addition to any serious art library.”
in a shameless promotion, I’m linking this book to Amazon where a small percentage of the sale goes to help support this site if you click from this link…
Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition

There is also an interesting new biography,Josef Albers: To Open Eyes you may want to consider.

A very interesting video from one of Albers former students (note he has several more related videos on Albers Color Theory for viewing on Vimeo)

Albers Homage To The Square: An Explanation from Richard (Dick) Nelson on Vimeo

A few excerpts from a long interview with Josef Albers from the Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institute Oral history interview in 1968
Complete interview can be read from this Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution link

JOSEF ALBERS:
And why do I paint squares since 1959, in the same design, in the same arrangement; Because I do not see that there is, in any visual articulation, one final solution. In science they think sometimes they have found a solution. Already the next year the whole thing may look upside down, and its not the truth any more. An example I have quoted repeatedly: in 1848 I think it was, (it was at that time when flying was considered an insoluble problem) that was a time when the chemists at an international congress agreed that we are not able to develop an organic compound from inorganic constituents. And in the next year, in 1849, Boettcher was able to develop an organic compound urea, you see. So, in science what seems true today may not be true tomorrow. There science is dealing with physical facts, in art we are dealing with psychic effects. With this I come to my first statement: The source of art – that is, where it comes from – is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect. That’s what I’m talking about. When I want to speak about why I am doing the same thing now, which is squares, for – how long? – 19 years. Because there is no final solution in any visual formulation. Although this may be just a belief on my part, I have some assurances that that is not the most stupid thing to do, through Cezanne, whom I consider as one of the greatest painters. From Cezanne we have, so the historians tell us – 250 paintings of Mont St. Victoire. But we know that Cezanne has left in the fields often more than he took home because he was disappointed with his work. So we may conclude he did many more than 250 of the same problem. Yes?

SEVIM FESCI: Yes.

JOSEF ALBERS: How see Van Gogh. You know his Sunflowers?

SEVIM FESCI: Yes, of course.

JOSEF ALBERS: He has traced them on tracing paper and then has transferred the tracings on new canvases, precisely the same shape. Every flower and leaf form is repeated precisely. This mad man undertook a method to save time and traced and transferred it on another canvas again and again, and filled out the contours with other colors. So we have multiplied sunflowers – I have photographed them, I have slides on it that prove that he made the same contour of sunflowers in other colors. We have two l’Arlesiennes. Why two? Because he was not satisfied with the first one. He said there is another possibility, you see. And that is what Picasso has said this way, I quote now, “When we are honest we have to admit that we never get what we want.” So I am excused when I make now several hundred squares. Yes? Or when you go downstairs and see – I am now in my red period. I was for years in the yellow period, you know. But now I am with the reds, it was hard for me to get into the reds. Very hard, how I am tickled to death to make more reds. Which one is the best I don’t know. But this is to show why I am promoting serial image. Because like Cezanne has demonstrated it, like Picasso has said it, “We don’t get what we want.” And therefore we continue, and therefore my saying is, “A painter paints because he has no time not to paint.” And I am a teacher because I teach all the time – now you are my victim – I teach and I have no time not to teach. And I’m a little bit disturbed when I have to play retrospective, as I did before. You see that I’ve changed my viewpoint

JOSEF ALBERS: I understand. But, you see, I am more interested to stimulate the creative process. In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness. I have tried to make people aware and ready to recognize – that’s again observation, the word I used before, and in articulation what is then the reaction to it. The creative process as such I have tried to lead back to the most basic attitude, and that is by presenting, and there I feel very instrumental, by presenting to my students material as such without telling them what to do, how to handle it, but ask them to find a new —

SEVIM FESCI: Way of expressing.

JOSEF ALBERS: No, not the word “expression” – I have told you already that’s not —

SEVIM FESCI: Of presenting them?

JOSEF ALBERS: — to find out what it is able to do, by presenting it with a new function. Therefore, I came furthermore to the conclusion just at the end of my formal teaching – I usually say I taught for a hundred years – that all art studies are in the end basic and that at art schools there are no graduate studies. The graduate studies come when they leave the school and are working their whole life and demonstrate that also in other fields. Graduate students don’t want to be led by professors. They want to find their own “nonsense”. So I have come to the conclusion that the graduate art school is an error. And I have experienced that in another way, also, When I was called to Yale Art School here I was expected to teach mainly the older – graduate students. But I made a point that I took first and mostly the beginners because the babies need more education than the grownups. And so the students out of the graduate class came into my basic courses without being asked to do that. Therefore I had such large classes in the basic courses in color and in drawing and later also when I gave basic design again. I’m very rough in the treating of my students. And in saying it now, I have said to my students “I am putting you into a vacuum and ask you to breathe.” But at the school we came to new discoveries, to new formulations, and that, I think, has been followed up more or less everywhere in the world.

JOSEF ALBERS: Well, I would say the aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth. And therefore the last 15-20 years in which everyone tried to be different from everyone else with the result that in their work, they all look alike, there is an artificial and not true relationship because honesty and modesty are forgotten. The more eccentric one behaved the more he was considered a personality. On the other hand, the, more you obey your constitutional inclinations, your constitutional preferences and prejudices, the more you are yourself. You have not to force so-called individuality. You have to avoid everything that makes you a Wagnerian blowing up your gestures, blowing up your verbal formulations. Therefore I recommend simplicity because it is honest against all over-dramatization.

More great information and imagery can be found on the Albers Foundation website

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