Water = Life

Mereia Anning, Hunting for Dugongs, 2001; acrylic on canvas.

Animals cannot live without water; scientists believe that life cannot begin without liquid water. An exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art, Water Ways: Tension and Flow, examines the relationship of water to human life. On a wall outside the gallery of photographs, many of monumental size, there is a small painting by an Australian Aboriginal artist showing traditional sustenance coming from the sea: fish, turtles, eel, and dugong (a sea mammal similar to a manatee). How long will our seas and waterways provide us with food if continue on our present path of despoilment?

Margaret Bourke White, Dust Bowl––Taken near LaMar, Colorado, 1953; gelatin silver print.

Yesterday, when I began working on this post, it was pouring rain. Here in the northeast, rain has been overabundant the past couple of years, while in the western United States there has been a drought of epic proportions. Bourke White's photograph, taken 20 years after the terrible dust storms of the "dirty 30s" shows that we did not learn from the mistakes made earlier. And we still haven't learned, as the Oglalla aquifer sinks and California farms suffer from lack of water. There is a great book by Timothy Egan and documentary by Ken Burns about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which I wrote about in this blog post.

Daniel Beltra, Alter Do Chao, Para (Brasil), from the series Amazon Drought, 2005; pigment print on paper.

It is not only in the US that drought has ruined landscapes: the photograph above was taken during a terrible drought in Brazil, where a vast watery region became dry and like a desert. What happens to the inhabitants during such a terrible time?

Nici Cumpston, Campsite III, Nookamka Lake III, from the series Attesting, 2008; archival print on canvas, hand colored with pencil and watercolor.

While some droughts are caused by natural weather patterns (should people be living in areas prone to drought or flood?), others, such as the American dustbowl, were caused by human activity. This dramatic work shows the drying out of one of the largest freshwater lakes in Australia. Overconsumption of water from the river that fed this lake is leading to its death.

Chris Jordan, Living Room Floor, Ninth Ward, from the series In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, 2005; pigmented inkjet print on paper. 

Then there's the opposite problem of too much water. In this touching image of a mud-caked floor (sorry for the reflections at the lower left), we sense the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and how it upended lives. The devastation of the flood was multiplied many times over because of the human channeling of the Mississippi River. The photographer, Chris Jordan, writes:

The 2005 hurricane season's extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices. 

Gideon Mendel, Joseph and Endurance Edem, with Their Children, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, 2012, from the series Drowning World; giclee print on paper.

Gideon Mendel has photographed the effects of flooding on the lives of people in several different countries in Asia and Europe. Joseph Edem is a traditional healer; he said:

This is my house. I was here when the rains began falling. Before we knew it the flood came. There was nothing we could do. I just ran out with me and wife and children. This water has been here for more than a month, with no help from anywhere.

Ian The, Kuye River, Yulin, Shaanxi, from the series Traces, 2010; chromogenic print.

In the exhibition are images of obvious environmental devastation, such as the one above, which looks nothing like a normal river landscape. Ian The writes:

Due to overmining, the water table has sunk, and the river that was once full is now nearly dry. The city, now wealthy from decades of coal mining, now regularly suffers from water shortages.

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill 1, REM Forza, Gulf of Mexico, 2010; digital chromogenic color photograph.

Image courtesy of Edward Burtynsky's website. 

Edward Burtynsky is a great photographer, both of beauty and of environmental degradation. His photograph of the BP oil spill is stunning and shocking. (I used a photo from his website, and the image below by James Balog, rather than my rather poor photos from the exhibition) Burtynsky writes about his series Water:

While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. 

James Balog, Birthday Canyon, Greenland Ice Sheet, from the series Extreme Ice Survey, 2009; chromogenic print.

Image courtesy of James Balog's website.

James Balog has been documenting the disappearing Arctic ice sheets in a series of gorgeous photographs, and in a powerfully beautiful and frightening documentary Chasing Ice, which I wrote about here; it is available for streaming on Netflix. His project is a very important one; we should all be aware of his work.

Altoon Sultan, Well, Rolinda, Central Valley, California, 2001; egg tempera on panel,15 x 17 in.

My paintings were not in this exhibition, but I wanted to show them in this post because they are about water. Twenty years ago I taught for three years in California and became aware of how the land was farmed: the bounty of produce coming from there was produced with irrigation and with lots of "inputs" of fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides.

Altoon Sultan, Young Pepper Plants, Gilroy, California, 2001; egg tempera on panel, 20 x 22 1/2 in.

The water came from far off, carried in concrete canals, or was pumped from groundwater wells, which held less and less each year. On a visit back to California some years later, I did studies for a series on water. A great book on water in the West, written in 1986 and foreseeing the problems that have now become so extreme, is Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner.

Tony Gleaton, A Son of Yemayá, Hopkins, Belize, from the series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America, 1992; gelatin silver print.

We are immersed in water, we are water. According to the USGS, the brains and heart are 73% water, the lungs 83%; even the bones are 31% water. Yemayá is a mother spirit in Yoruba mythology, a "patron spirit of women, and the mother of all living things. She is often shown rising from the water or as the owner of all water." (from the wall label) May she protect us from ourselves.

My Changing Eye

As I walked around a familiar local hill farm yesterday, one with sweeping views of the surrounding landscape, I thought about how my eye has changed over the many years I've been going there. This photo, and all the others in this post are from yesterday's farm visit, and show different ways of seeing. Twenty years ago I may have wanted to paint an image like this, with agricultural architecture within a landscape....

Milking Time, Landaff, New Hampshire, 1991; oil on canvas, 32 x 110 in.

....a painting such as this, with the buildings and roads leading back in space. I often added figures for a narrative element.

Over time I became more interested in the stuff of farming, the ordinary things––machinery, plastics, structures such as silage bunkers and hoop barns––that were "ugly", and were evidence of the messy actuality of agriculture.

Blue Bucket, Barnet, Vermont, 1998; egg tempera on panel, 12 x 12 in.

So here I painted a battered plastic bucket, its color beautiful, meant as a warning for the culvert below. I painted this in the studio using a color study and black and white photos, as I did with all my work during these years. This scene was on the same farm that I photographed yesterday.

Irrigation Pipes, Barnet, Vermont, 2002; oil on canvas, 52 x 84 in.

At the time I loved the idea of contrasting the conventional beauty of the landscape with the industrial elements of modern farming. This view is across the valley from yesterday's farm, which can be seen on the hill in the distance at the left.

Then landscape began to recede in importance for me. Actually, I could no longer stand to do the work of painting all those distant trees, all that detail. I wanted to simplify the structure of my paintings.

Soon there was no landscape at all in the paintings, just the objects, seen almost as still life. I remember in the early 2000s, my gallery telling me that they could sell my work better if I put more landscape in it; I had to reply that it no longer had any landscape at all.

Black Tank (for Guston), 2005; egg tempera on panel, 27 x 32

Now it was just the things that excited me, even a fuel tank that I saw at this same farm, so different in subject and structure from Blue Bucket above. I painted some fairly complex, large compositions, along with smaller ones. So, I can do that kind of work, and I know a lot of people are disappointed that I don't still do it, especially the paintings with landscape. But we have to do what feels right to us, and what I have become most interested in is the tradition of twentieth century minimalist abstraction; I wanted to take what I knew and see it through that reductive lens. Those are the paintings that most excite me––paintings by, for instance, Mondrian, Malevich, Popova; and more recently Kelly, Heilmann, Mangold, Tantric painting––not twentieth century representational painting (although of course there are artists that I love who paint the visual world, such as Morandi and Sheeler). Hopper used to be an artist hero of mine; now it's Blinky Palermo.

So here is where I end up: a circle above an angled plane, cast shadows, and two small circles below. A representation, simplified, pared down to a few elements, which will change a bit when transformed into paint. It is not my job to judge my work, just to do the best that I think I can, while loving the process, which I do.

"Chasing Ice": The Tragic Sublime

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Alaska, June 20, 2008 (detail)

All photographs are by James Balog and are from the following three sites:

Chasing Ice; James Balog Photography, Extreme Ice Survey & Ice; Extreme Ice Survey

The word "sublime" has become a commonplace––"oh, that pie is sublime!"––but to philosophers of aesthetics and to 19th century landscape painters the concept included horror. To Kant (I quote from the Wikipedia link on the sublime) it included "the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying". For Schopenhauer beauty was pleasure in seeing a benign object, while the sublime was seeing "an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer." It seems to me that nothing could express this idea of the sublime better than the icy regions of the globe, terrifying in their grandeur. These regions of glaciers and frost are now also frightening to contemplate, in that they are giving us disastrous news about the state of our planet.

Lindblad Cove, Antartica, January 11, 2011

James Balog, a photographer concerned with environmental issues, went to the Arctic to photograph glaciers on assignment for National Geographic. He was so struck by the evidence of climate change there that he made it his mission to document the changes happening, much too rapidly, to the world's glaciers. From this idea came the Extreme Ice Survey, and Chasing Ice, a stunning documentary about this important project; you can see the film on Netflix. Thanks to my friend, the artist and very concerned citizen, Ravenna Taylor, for alerting me to this beautiful and horrifying film. The beauty of these places is astounding, surprising; Balog's eye for pictorial drama makes the story so much more compelling.

Jokulsarlon, Iceland, "Icebergs that originated in the vast expanse of the Vatnajokull decay and melt in a tidal lagoon." March 4, 2005

Balog began the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007 to document the changes in glaciers over several years. There were many technical challenges in setting up cameras in severe climates that would automatically photograph the views in front of them over months. You can see some of the videos made by time-lapse techniques at the Extreme Ice Survey link above. They clearly show glaciers in retreat.

Ilulissat Glacier, Greenland. "A helicopter flying past a half-mile wide section of the Ilulissat Glacier calving face gives perspective on the staggering immensity of this ice wall (in some places it may be 70 stories tall)."

The enormous size of the glaciers seems boundless, immutable. But in fact, although glaciers always retreated a bit during summer and reformed during winter, now they are simply in retreat.

Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland, August 24, 2007

Icebergs are pieces of a glacier that have broken off and floated out to sea.

Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland. "Icebergs that have rolled over and been scalloped by waves metamorphose into fantastic shapes." August 24, 2007.

This has always happened, but the rate at which it is now occurring is much faster than in the past. In the film Chasing Ice, we see an entire wall of a glacier collapse, an astounding sight.

Ilulissat Isfjord, Greenland; Iceberg, July 17, 2007.

The fabulous forms of ice are wondrous and like nothing else. I can understand why artists such as Frederic Church in the 19th century went to the Arctic to paint icebergs:

Frederic Church, The Icebergs, 1861; oil on canvas, 64.5 x 112.5 in.

Svinafellsjokull Glacier, Iceland. "...a massive landscape of crevasses". February 12, 2008. (detail)

The intense blue of some of the ice is a marvel....

Greenland Ice Sheet, "Adam LeWinter surveys Birthday Canyon". June 28, 2009.

....as is the tremendous size and dwarfing scale of glaciers and ice sheets. They are among the great wonders of the earth, and they are surely disappearing due to our actions, and to our inaction about climate change.

Greenland Ice Sheet, "Bubbles of ancient air, possibly 15,000 years old, are released as the ice sheet melts." July 14, 2008.

The Greenland ice sheet is littered with dark holes in its surface, holes that attract more and more heat, and that release eons-old air from its depths. It is melting at a rate of 47 cubic miles per year. If the entire sheet of ice melted, sea levels would rise 24 feet, but that would likely take hundreds of years, though there is disagreement about it among scientists (see the link). It is clear, though, that even moderate melting would not be a good thing. James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey are performing a great public service in making us aware, by luring us with beauty, of the danger that comes with it.

Have a Sweet New Year!

John Peto, Help Yourself, 1881; oil on canvas, 8 1/16 x 10 1/16 in.

How better to ring in the New Year than with images of sweets, signs of delicious delight? I wish that you all can help yourself to the good things in life. Peto shows us that beauty and wonder can come in a small, ordinary, simple package.

Wayne Thiebaud, Seven Suckers, 1970; oil on canvas, 19 x 23 in.

Image courtesy NY Times.

One of the great painters of desserts brings us yummy suckers, the luscious paint as juicy as the candy.

Will Cotton, Chocolate Forest, 2001; oil on linen, 75 x100 in. 

Image courtesy Will Cotton.

For my chocolate loving friends, here is a huge painting (imagine standing in front of this bigger than 6 foot high by 8 foot wide canvas!) of chocolate lawn, lake, and trees: heaven for some.

Photography Studio: Schadde Brothers, Satinettes, Filled Confections, and Ye Old Style Stick Candy, ca. 1915; gelatin silver print, 8 1/2 x 10 5/8 in. 

Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I enjoy going to the Met's website where you can search their collections. When I put "candy" in the search bar, several photos by this studio came up. They reminded me of my childhood, when you could go into a store and buy penny candy.

Box, Britain, early 19th century; enamel on copper, 1 5/8 x 1 1/2 in. 

Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This charming little box held sweets. Boxes such as this were popular gifts in 18th century England. I offer you only its image as a New Year's gift.

Juan Van der Hamen, Still Life with Sweets and Pottery, 1627; oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 48 13/16 in.

In 17th century Spain, the boxes holding sweets were of wood, and glass jars held moist confections. Like a table spread with delicious treats, may the new year bring you joy.

A New Painting: "Linked", from Source Image to Painting

Linked, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 5 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.

I never show my source photographs for a very good reason: they have more "reality" than the paintings I make from them, so can seem more appealing and stronger; they can give a mistaken idea of what I'm after in the work. Here on this blog we are looking at a digital image of a physical painting and a digital image of a digital image; if we were in my studio looking at the painting and a print of the photo, the relationship between the two would be reversed, with the painting having more presence. But I wanted to speak to the way I transform the photo, so showing it will help in my explanation. 

The most noticeable change is that I simplify the given image, leaving out details of wear and rust and dirt, in order to take the work out of the specific and into more formal concerns––color, shape, light, composition––and into something beyond the ordinary. What grabbed my eye were the repeating links, lined up in a subtle tilt upwards, with the stronger diagonal below them. Those two elements, along with the odd shape of cast shadows, were my focus. But what to do with the rest of the composition? I tried many different approaches: making the background very dark, as in a Spanish still life painting, but it looked awful. I tried adding some of the complexity that was on that machine behind the links but that didn't work either. I tried different colors, different shapes. What I finally settled on was a diagonal above the links that was opposite to the main diagonal below, with a shadow running across it. This shape was invented to serve a compositional need. As for color, I ended up with variations of yellow; I'd tried black, blue, red, brown, for the bottom right and upper left triangles. I painted this picture using Titanium white, two yellows––Cadmium yellow medium and light––Cadmium red medium, and Ultramarine blue, for me a limited palette. 

Linked detail

The point of all this is that I am not trying to make a realistic rendering of an observed object, though I continue to love the visual pop of a three dimensional illusion of form. I am very tied to the visual world in my paintings, but it is only the foundation in my construction of an image.

Ad Reinhardt: A Protean Intelligence

Ad Reinhardt cartoon via Hyperallergic, image courtesy David Zwirner Gallery. 

It is difficult to imagine that the artist who wrote

Fine art can only be defined as exclusive, negative, absolute, and timeless. It is not practical, useful, related, applicable, or subservient to anything else.

in an essay "Twelve Rules for a New Academy" could also be a brilliant cartoonist, an insightful photographer, and a painter of famously "black" paintings. Yet Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) is all that, and a writer of intense prose. In a recent remarkable exhibition at David Zwirner gallery, we could see the range of Reinhardt's output, his piercing intelligence, and his sharp eye. One large room was dedicated to Reinhardt's cartooning work, of which the most widely known are his art cartoons, such as the one above. Reinhardt drew from the position of a leftist and many of his cartoons appeared in leftist newspapers or magazines such as The New Masses and PM. He was intensely critical of the new art market. 

I was familiar with Reinhardt's art cartoons, more of which can be seen here on Hyperallergic. Some had the theme of "how to look" and attempted to help interested people look at art. So he wrote:

Why do artists paint? What do they mean? –– We can't do your thinking and looking for you (the way a hearst-paper does) but we'll try to help you know what you're looking at and for and so represent something yourself. 

I did not know his other cartoons, such as the one above about the human family.

I was surprised and delighted by cartoons on other subjects, such as these on love and on marriage. The first quote is from a 16th century poem by Robert Green, "The Shepherd's Wife's Song": "What lady would not love a shepherd swain?"

Then there were these whimsical little bugs.

I loved this page of sketches, precise yet lighthearted, of Italian electrical pylons in all their variety.

A page from a notebook explores Eastern religions, stating "Religion begins where theory ends."
There is an interesting video, a walk through guide by Robert Storr, the curator of the show, in which Storr talks about this room of the exhibition in depth.

The aspect of Reinhardt's work that was a complete surprise to me, and was wonderful to see, was his photography. The image above is the cover of a small catalog that the gallery provided, with an essay by Prudence Peiffer. Reinhardt traveled widely and was open to all images, from great artworks to accidental markings. He had a collection of over 12,000 slides, which he showed in organized formal groupings to friends, students, and at the Artist's Club in what he called "non-happenings".

It was fascinating to watch the slide show at the gallery, waiting to see the correspondences between images, the surprises of similar forms. I took a few photos of a part of one sequence, showing crosses, in painting...

....on an ordinary structure.....

....and on two more elegant architectural details. In the compilation of images above you can see a few more of the visual themes he explored. The slides show a mind constantly thinking and alert to the visual subtleties of the world.

image courtesy of David Zwirner

All the rich image and text of the slides and the cartoons finally lead us to the distilled paintings for which Reinhardt was famous, the seemingly black paintings of the 1960s. Thirteen of them are gathered in this one room of the gallery, skylit so you can look at them in natural light. You can't just glance at these paintings, you have to spend a long time quietly looking at them in order to see what is there. In a way, this is Reinhardt's most subversive achievement, much more than any of his barbed cartoons: he forces us to slow down, to contemplate, to have a visual experience of the highest order, one of experience and discovery; for me there was a kind of longing, a search for pure essence. In his essay [ART-AS-ART] Reinhardt wrote: 

The one standard in art is oneness and fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is always the end of art.   

......These paintings and comments present no clear understanding, no precise ground plan for our labors to follow. They represent only bricks and mortar materials awaiting use in the shaping of our own individual understanding. Until that time they remain but random comments. 

You can read this essay and others here in the collection Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt.

Abstract Painting, 1960-66; oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in. Collection of Guggenheim Museum.

I tried to photograph some of the paintings in the show, but it was impossible; all I got was a fuzzy black square. In the photo above, you can see, faintly, the subtle shifting of color squares, but it is not at all close to the experience of standing in front of one of the paintings, whose rich dark colors emerge slowly, embedded within one "horizontal form negating one vertical form", as Reinhardt described his series. His aim of transcendence and timelessness is surely here, as is

Everything into irreducibility, unreproducibility, imperceptibility.