Questions I Ask Myself While Painting

    

When we work at tasks––cooking, cleaning, gardening, repairing––I imagine that all of us ask ourselves questions, whether consciously or not. Do I add more salt? where should I put this new plant? how can I fix this cupboard door with its loose hinge? will wood putty work? When I'm in the process of painting, which I've been doing for about 50 years (yikes!) I don't usually pay attention to the questions asked, decisions made; although they are constant, I don't focus clearly on them. Painting became like walking, where I don't have to ponder each muscle movement in order to go forward. 

But then, a painting ago, the questions became loud and clear in my head; I noticed them. The questions were about process, about the step by step making of a painting, and not anything philosophical: not why am I doing this at all, not what I'm trying to say. Just process. I imagine every artist has their own particular questions. A first question for me is the palette and which color pastes are to be laid out in the small cups: do I need Cadmium orange? which yellow should I use, Cad yellow medium or light? should I mix the greens I'll need? if so, which blues will come in handy? Ultramarine deep? Cobalt blue deep, or light or standard? maybe a green? Why oh why didn't I order more Chrome oxide green? Should I use some Phthalo green? if so, warm or cool? 

I use photographic sources for my work, so there are often decisions to be made as to how faithfully to follow the image. For this painting one large question was: what color do I paint the lower right corner? The source was green grass, which would not do at all. The warm brown you see sketched in above was many colors before it got to that one. Should it be dark green? blue? a warm earth red? maybe more yellow in that? lighter? darker? Each questioned color was tried and wiped off, to start anew. Should the color have transparency? or be more opaque? I actually thought this: should the color be dead or alive? I think my question meant how intense should the color be? should it recede, or pop, or be on the same plane as the shapes above? 

There are always questions about the composition: will I move the diagonals so that they touch the corners? what about that dark edge: put it in or leave it out? Should I widen the left rectangle? Where should I place the red circle? centered, or higher? And the biggest question: do I leave the arm coming from the left side of the red disk? And the protruding brown cylinder: is it be seen from above, as in the source image, or straight on? 

Here is a detail of that part of the painting, finished, with the questions answered.

Colors chosen bring up a litany of questions, for every color in every painting. Many years ago, when I was a student at Skowhegan, our rallying cry was "Hue! Value! Intensity!", the three qualities of color. Getting these greens––in shadow and light––to work required many layers of color answering how warm? how cool? how light? how dark? how intense do I want the color to be? which blue or green or yellow will give the hue I want? will the shadow color be more or less transparent? will adding white kill the color, or would yellow work? which yellow? maybe I should add lemon yellow to my palette? And the touch, or facture: do I want it to show a subtle painterliness or a more opaque surface? Will the green rectangle on the left be lighter, warmer than the triangular green? How about the lights? how warm, how light? One of the great qualities of egg tempera is its translucency, which allows for color mixing while layering paint. And after each layer, each new color: does it sit properly in space? does it carry enough light?  

 

Red Disk, 2021, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 7 5/8 x 8 5/8 in.

A final question: do I include a photo of the finished painting in this blog post? 

As I thought about why my list of questions moved to the foreground of my mind, I remembered that I'd recently read a wonderful poem by John Yau, "Fifty for Richard Nonas", the sculptor, which consisted of a long list of questions, questions that are enlightening, thoughtful, demanding, confounding, compelling, essential. I love this::

What is invisible inside this place you are filling with carbon dioxide? What besides air, light, and memories? 

(click to enlarge)

Small Objects of My Affection

Sitting on my desk, where I can see them just beyond my computer, are these four small objects. I can't quite explain why, but they comfort me with their familiarity, their shapes, their stories, their unique character. Two of them are reproductions of ancient objects: the bowl with human feet is a favorite piece in the Met's Egyptian collection; the stag is copied from an early bronze age sculpture from Anatolia, which I bought on a marvelous visit to Turkey 20 years ago. The two birds are paperweights, a chicken acquired from an antique shop ages ago, and a dainty Lalique which was in my beloved mother's collection. I see the chicken pecking away and the little glass bird about to take flight. Embedded in them are memories and silent affection. All four of of my desk companions elicit a sense of life, in their still and quiet way.

I began to think about my relationship to the inanimate objects around my house after reading this beautiful and touching prose poem, "Fetish" by Pierre Reverdy, in the book published by Black Square Editions. 

A little doll, a good luck marionette, she struggles at my window, at the mercy of the wind. The rain has soaked her dress, her face, and her hands, which are fading. She's even lost a leg. But her ring remains, and with it her power. In winter she knocks at the windowpane with her little foot in its blue shoe, and she dances, dances from joy, from the cold, to warm her heart again, her good luck wooden heart. At night she raises her suppliant arms toward the stars. 

Yes, these objects are fetishes, in the sense of embodying magic. Even though the marionette is well-worn she still has her power, and she dances with joy. 

A little stuffed alligator, with his wide smile and waving arms, looks out at me over my bedside clock with humor and charm. His silly attitude reminds me not to take myself too seriously, to remember to relax and smile, so he's an excellent bedtime friend. I'm especially fond of this little creature because I found him in my mother's collection of tiny toys for her great-grandchildren. 

This salt and pepper set and the pieces to follow are antique shop and yard sale finds that I've had for many years. The shakers have the shape of the birds they are named after––kookaburras––with large beaks and squat shapes, but their bright colors are a vivid invention. When I look at them I think of the raucous laugh of these birds, which I was lucky enough to hear in the Australian outback many years ago; it's a startling sound.  

A delicate herd of tiny animals, not more than 2 inches high, sits on my mantle. I love their shapes, simple yet speaking of each individual animal. They have a poignant vulnerability, with straight pins inserted into their bodies where thin legs have broken off. 

With elegant curved form topped with a black beret, a perky fellow sits on a pull toy. The large red wheels give him motion, which he addresses with his upright stance. 

Being a person who likes machines––machines inspire my artwork––I had to include a little wooden toy truck in this post. I imagine it being given to a child or grandchild, who would love pulling or pushing it about. Ah, the shapes! Blue cylinder atop red cylinder, alongside yellow rectangle, all on a black rectangle studded with red circles; so beautifully abstract. 

Each of these objects, and many more around my house, are imbued with a spirit of their own. Like Reverdy's marionette, they have heart and joy, good luck and power; they are magical.

Borders, Boundaries

 

I walk across a small field in full sunlight. The light touches leaves and grasses, shifting with the breezes; it sparkles on the tall, thin grasses and glows on leafy surfaces. There is a trodden path through the growth, but the 4 foot tall flowering grasses still brush against my skin, with a slightly scratchy feeling. (I'd like to use the word raspy, incorrectly, as I think of a wood rasp, with its small holes, tickling away the edges of a wood panel.) Ahead of me I see the dark edge of the woods.

When I cross that border from bright fields to shadowed woods it is as though I am in a different body, one that is cooler, cradled, limited in sight. From a horizontal world, open and expansive, I enter one that is vertical, where I look up to treetops and down to the ground. I often think of the words of Robert Frost, which come to me unbidden: 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

This line is from his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". In it he speaks of that most unforgiving of borders, that between life and death, in saying

But I have promises to keep, 

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

In the woods are many stone walls, walls that used to be the borders between property owners, separating long-gone open fields. A few days ago I noticed the red boundary marker for the southwest corner of my property; I hadn't paid attention to these boundaries for years. 

Many of the walls have fallen apart; stones are no longer piled one atop the other in an orderly fashion; trees grow through them. The hard labor of transporting and placing large rocks and huge boulders is undone.  Another Frost poem, "Mending Wall", has a phrase that echoes through my head:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall

The poem is a wonderfully wrought, simply put questioning on the necessity of walls, because even though his neighbor insists

Good fences make good neighbors

Frost wonders why a wall is needed between an orchard and a pine woods. And we can now take that questioning out into the larger world. 

The curved line of metal is all that remains of a gate that stood in the southeastern corner of my field, a forlorn reminder of the futility of fixed boundaries.

Artists and Critics

 

Honoré Daumier, "Well, if you look very closely you might ending finding some quality; the color seems to be good."

In Jean Frémon's marvelous little book, The Paradoxes of Robert Ryman, he writes almost apologetically about his role as a writer on art:

All of us who write on art or artists have an extreme presumptuousness. We hold forth on the ins and outs, means and ends, and in reality we know nothing; nothing of what it is to truly take, on the end of a brush, the color from a palette and put it on a panel. We dissect thoughts while the painter searches for the form. Thought is within it and cannot be formulated in words. The thought of a painting is not discursive. It matters to the greatest degree and at the same time is on no consequence. It is everything, but it is nothing. It is there. In any case. Before and after. The only thing that matters is the form that it takes here and now: a little bit of white pigment taken up the this palette, on the end of a brush, and set down on that surface. 

In this modest declaration, Frémon shows himself to be a most sensitive and thoughtful writer. He has so many insightful things to say in this book that go beyond referencing just Ryman, such as:

Miro, Rothko, Ryman....deepened their thought in order to enlarge our understanding of the work of art, and our perception of the world. They do it not as historians or as sociologists but as artists; the proposition that they advance is not along the lines of semiotic analysis or chemical experiment; it is an object, an unexpected object, even if all the steps of its production have been carefully prepared, an object with no other purpose than itself, made to be seen, simple, and whose mystery holds us attentive, whose mystery touches us. 

 

This quality, obviousness and mystery, is what one speaks of the least when one speaks of a painting, because it is that whereof one cannot speaki. Thus, it is necessary to fall silent. Wittgenstein would say, Fall silent and look.

Frémon has not fallen silent, for which I am grateful because he's a wonderful writer. Artists cannot fall totally silent either, not about their own work or that of others. I've long believed that it is a good thing to be somewhat articulate about one's own work, to think about it as clearly as possible, as it allows us to move forward intelligently. But as the maker of the work, we can't ever have a new eye to see it in a different way.

Many years ago I was at a lecture given by Lucy Lippard, and one thing that she said has stayed with me because it is so important: she believed that the role of the critic was to be a "sympathetic observer". The critic can look at the art object and find connections, explore meanings of both form and content,  respond in an open and intelligent way to what they are seeing; this enlarges our understanding.  Over my long career I've been lucky to have had many reviews in which the writer was certainly sympathetic, and observant, pointing things out in my work that I hadn't thought of. Having the physical object of a painting translated into poetic prose is a delight and a gift. I did once get a nasty negative review, almost 40 years ago, and in the NY Times. I was a young artist and it crushed me (I did get other laudatory reviews in that paper). I now wonder what the point was of writing something so mean spirited? I don't read these kinds of blistering reviews any more, or perhaps I'm just not aware of them. It seems to me that writers on art have adopted Lippard's credo and  have provided us with a rich and informative range of texts, and the arts are definitely better for it. 

A Renewal

 

It's been several years since I've posted on this blog, but some reading I've been doing lately has got me thinking that I might enjoy writing again. It's early spring here in northern Vermont, the ice is receding from the edges of the pond, green leaves are visible under the shallow pond water: a time to start afresh. 

The poems of Alberto Caeiro, a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa are making me aware again of the value of looking closely at the world around me: 

The astonishing reality of things

Is my daily discovery.

Each thing is what it is,

And it's hard to explain to someone how much joy this gives me,

And how much that joy suffices me. 

And

In my gaze, everything is clear as a sunflower,

I'm in the habit of going for walks along the roads,

Looking to the right and to the left,

And now and then looking back...

And what I see at each moment Is something I've never seen before,

And I'm very good at that...

I know how to feel the profound astonishment 

A child would feel if, on being born, 

He realized that he truly had been born...

I feel newborn with every moment

To the complete newness of the world...

Caeiro asks us to look, to truly see, with no preconceptions, no thought. I've also been reading several modernist French writers, such as Jean Frémon, Pierre Reverdy, Franck André Jamme, and Philippe Jaccottet whose prose styles are inspiring. It is Jaccottet's Seedtime, selections from his notebooks, that also made me think about making notebook-like entries in my blog, along with photographs. Although the blog is titled Studio and Garden, I don't think I'll post my artwork here, but will leave that to Facebook and Instagram. But I do hope to write about art that I see in museums and galleries, once I'm back to visiting those wonderful, much-missed places.

In the woods, the mosses have been refreshed by yesterday's rain, and their intense greens can't be matched in the natural world. Their shapes vary, from tiny tree-like forms to soft cushiony shapes, some that make resting on a moss-covered rock inviting. 

In the first entry in Jaccottet's Seedtime, he urges us towards a "complete forgetting": 

Attachment to the self renders life more opaque. One moment of complete forgetting and all the screens, one behind the other, become transparent so that you can perceive clarity to its very depths, as far as the eye can see, and at the same time everything becomes weightless. Thus does the soul truly become a bird. 

On William Gass's "On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry"

Language can be delicious, a taste of words juicy on the tongue, tart and sweet, with a complex depth of flavors. Such was my experience reading the long essay by William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Although ostensibly about the color blue in all its manifestations––visual, physical, metaphoric––the essay is truly a celebration of language. Why blue?

Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere; in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is there most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dart soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling. 

And Gass makes lively lists:

There's the blue skin of cold, contusion, sickness, fear...absent air, morbidity, the venereals, blue pox...gloom.
There are whole schools of fish, clumps of trees, flocks of birds, bouquets of flowers: blue channel cats, the ash, beech, birch, bluegills, breams, and bass, Andalusian fowl, acaras, angels in decorative tanks, the bluebill, bluecap, and blue billy (a petrel of the southern seas), anemone, bindweed, bur, bell, mullet, salmon, trout, cod, daisy, and a blue leaved and flowered mountain plant called the blue beardtongue because of its conspicuous yellow-bearded sterile stamens.

...blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit...  

I came across mention of this book while I was puttering along on my boxed paintings, Blues, and thought it would be appropriate to read it then. Gass names colors, vividly:

It is of course the sky. It is the sky's pale deep endlessness, sometimes so intense at noon the brightness flakes like a fresco. Then at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us, not like dew but settling dust or poisonous exhaust from all the life burned up while we were busy being other than ourselves. For our blues we have the azures and ceruleans, lapis lazulis, the light and dusty, the powder blues, the deeps: royal, sapphire, navy, and marine; there are the pavonian or peacock blues, the reddish blues: damson, madder and cadet, hyacinth, periwinkle, wine, wisteria and mulberry; there are the sloe blues, a bit purpled or violescent, and then the green blues, too: robin's egg and eggshell blue, beryl, cobalt, glaucous blue, jouvence, turquoise, aquarmarine. 

And he goes on with more naming of dyes and pigments. But much of this essay is about blue language––vulgar, dirty, obscene, pornographic––and the failure of language to describe sex:

I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken's wing.  

He doesn't shy away from  profanity, he revels in it, and what could be thought of as vulgar language (just to warn you if you decide to read the essay.) He praises John Barth for not "disrupting the form" by describing a rape, only "that the lady was ravished unmercifully and turns his hero sadly away". Gass tells us, passionately,

that the ultimate and essential displacement is to the word, and that the true sexuality in literature––sex as a positive aesthetic quality––lies not in any scene and subject, nor in the mere appearance of a vulgar word, not in the thick smear of a blue spot, but in the consequences on the page of love well made––made to the medium which is the writer's own, for he––for she––has only these little shapes and sounds to work with, the same saliva surrounds them all, every word is equally a squiggle or a noise, an abstract designation (the class of cocks, for instance, or the sub-class of father-defilers), and a crowd of meanings as randomly connected by time and use as a child connects his tinkertoys. .....what counts is not what lascivious sights your loins can tie to your thoughts like Lucky is to Pozzo, but love lavished on speech of any kind, regardless of content and intention. 

 This spill of words, as through the entire essay, is thrilling to read: words built as though physical things to move around, to build with, to sculpt, not just thin squiggles on a page. Gass praises other authors in addition to Barth, and my most favorite author of all, Henry James; how could I not love this essay when James is praised in this way:

If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we'd never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood? Who else would robe us so richly, take us to the best places, or guard our virtue as his wont and defend our character in every situation? If we were his sentences, we'd sing ourselves though we were dying and about to be extinguished, since the silence which would follow our passing would not be like the pause left behind by a noisy train. It would be a memorial, well-remarked, grave, jut as the Master has assured us death itself is: the distinguished thing. 

Oh my oh my! I am again swept away, thrilled by the words....my copy of the essay is full of underlinings, and I'd like to share many more, but this post would be much much too long. I will end with Gass's advice to writers, which could just as well refer to any of the arts:

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there's one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, in not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings its own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words that say them....

                         

Michel de Montaigne: A Man in his Tower, Thinking and Writing

Montaigne's tower where he had his library.

Images courtesey of Wikipedia.

Here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without striving or artifice; for it is my own self that I am painting..../And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.  

I undertake to write without preconceptions on any subject which comes to mind, employing nothing but my own natural resources...What I myself have thought up and produced is poor feeble stuff, but I let it go on, without plastering over the cracks or stitching up the rents which have been revealed by such comparisons [with the great authors of the past]. 

Ah, how can one not be charmed by these sentiments––as overly modest as they may be––and how amazing that they were written in the 16th century by a French nobleman, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592). In his massive books of essays, Essais written over 20 years (the French essayer means to try, to attempt) he ranged widely in his thoughts, writing essays:

On sadness; On liars; On idleness; On constancy; That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them; On Moderation; On the Cannibals; Judgements on God's ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence; On the uncertainty of our judgement; On smells; To philosophize is to learn how to die; On educating children; On drunkenness; On cruelty; On vanity.....

....and that is just a small sample. Although each essay has a subject, Montaigne wanders about while discussing it, adding stories that he heard or witnessed, classical quotes, ideas sometimes tenuously connected to the subject at hand. This makes for a casual read, comfortable, like chatting with a friend. He is the originator of the essay form, looking inside himself and writing what he thinks. And, he was at times very funny. In writing about his memory, which he "can hardly find a trace of it in myself"; but its lack has its positive aspects: it has helped him to avoid ambition in worldly affairs and 

Then again, I talk less; it is always easier to draw on the storehouse of memory than to find something original to say. If my memory had stood fast, I would have deafened my friends with my chatter......Once you are off, it is hard to cut if short and stop talking. Nothing tells you more about a horse than a pronounced ability to pull up short. I have even known men who can speak pertinently, who want to stop their gallop, but who do not know how to do so. While looking for a way to bring their hoofs together they amble on like sick men, dragging out trivialities.

I quote this to give you an idea of how easy going and rambling and interesting the essays are; how readable and thought provoking. Of course, praise must be given to the translator of the complete essays. The version I have was translated by M.A. Screech, originally published in 1991; it includes a short and helpful introduction to each essay and copious notes. 

I was introduced to Montaigne via a wonderful biography, worthy of his character: How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. Bakewell loves her subject; her engaging writing leads us to also love him. Her book is biography and philosophy combined; it's a book that both entertains and invites us to think about big questions, not only how to live but also how to die. Montaigne lived during a terrible time in France, that of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, a time of such violence that our current religious brutality seems minor in comparison. This made him conservative in supporting the Catholic church over the new Protestants (although he did support Henri of Navarre, a Protestant, to be king, showing his pragmatism and his belief in good character above all else); he wrote "I abhor novelty....for I have seen some of its disastrous effects...". Montaigne was also remarkably modern in his relativistic acknowledgment––explicit in the essay "On Habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law"––that we are most comfortable with our own customs, thinking those of others unnatural and even immoral:

Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same... 

The laws of conscience which we say are born of Nature are born of custom.  

...usage hides the true aspect of things from us.

Bakewell tells us of Montaigne's unusual education as a child: his father's unusual educational ideas led him to engage a Latin scholar as tutor so that Latin was his first language. Another essay of his that is very modern in its ideas is "On educating children". He insists that learning should be a joyous activity:

The most express sign of wisdom is unruffled joy: like all in the realms above the Moon, her state is ever serene.

He is dismissive of just book-learning; he wants the child to learn judgement, and to experience the world.

For our boy any place and any time can be used to study: his room, a garden; his table, his bed; when alone or in company; morning and evening. His chief study will be philosophy, that Former of good judgement and character who is privileged to be concerned with everything.

Montaigne is very much of his time in dismissing the abilities of women, although he did have women friends who he respected. There is so much about him to be admired that I can overlook this lapse into customary prejudice. This post is very long because it's difficult to summarize Montaigne's writing; I keep wanting to quote this and this and this. But if this is at all intriguing to you, I highly recommend Bakewell's book How to Live as a great introduction to the man and his thought. I will leave you with one last characteristic statement from Montaigne, one that is so modern and so modest; these sentiments could be/have been my sentiments:

Anyway these are my humours, my opinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me. I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed. I feel too badly taught to teach others.

*You can read a selection of Montaigne quotes at this Wikipedia link. 

"On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" by William James

I have been reading a biography of the philosopher and psychologist William James, In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert Richardson. It has brought back to mind some essays of James, a humanist thinker whose ideas on the multiplicity of life, and the primacy of experience, are very attractive to me. I have written about his essays: the brilliant one on "Habit"; on "The Gospel of Relaxation", comparing it to Buddhist thought. And I've written on his great short essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings". I am for the first time republishing a blog post, one that I wrote two years ago, just before Christmas, soon after the school shooting at Sandy Hook. It seems to me that we need James's wisdom yet again after the recent police shootings, his admonishment that we can't know what is in another heart. This understanding would go a long way to allaying prejudices; if we all could accept this, would racism still exist? 

In this season of "peace on earth, good will to men", I wanted to share with you some of the ideas from a beautiful essay by the philosopher William James titled "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings", written in 1898, which you can read here. He writes:

...the blindness in human beings of which this discourse will treat is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves. 

To make his points, James quotes various writers at length––Stevenson, Wordsworth, Whitman, Tolstoy––but he begins with a couple of personal anecdotes, one about the disconnect in understanding between us and our dogs, which goes a long way in humorously illustrating mutual miscomprehension:

"Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!––we to the rapture of bones under hedges...they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge in your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will towards you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life?"

 James also tells us of traveling through North Carolina and seeing clearings made by settlers which he thought showed "unmitigated squalor", nature defiled. But it was explained to him that these rude clearings were victories for the people living there. I thought back on the early settlers of Vermont, who cleared land bit by bit, planting between tree stumps, whose land must have looked violently ugly at first. He admitted that he "had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine..."

I reread this essay today with an open heart, trying to accept, in this time of mass shootings and political rancor, that I must be willing to see the significance of other lives. James, by quoting a long excerpt from Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Lantern Bearers", points out that all lives have an inner glow that might be hidden by "a rude mound of mud", but that, according to Stevenson, "...the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out out where joy resides, and give it a voice beyond singing....For to miss the joy is to miss all".

So much of this essay, and one that follows, "What Makes a Life Significant", is an elucidation of deeply democratic principles, a belief that it is not only the lives of the successful and powerful that have meaning; James quotes Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" here to great effect, where "Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!" The great gathering of humanity is as beautiful and enlarging as Wordsworth's mountain dawns. These words of James are like gospel to me:

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and importance. 

This post would be very long if I included every sentence underlined, every paragraph highlighted. If your interest is piqued, read the essay at the link above; it is fairly short and very readable since it was originally delivered as a lecture. But I will end with James' summing up final paragraph:

And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field. 

A Life Changing Critique

Failures 

Can a critique change the course of an artist's life, being that a change in their art is equivalent to a change in their life? In mid-September 1849, Gustave Flaubert asked his trusted friends Maxime du Camp and Louis Bouilhet to listen to a reading of his just completed manuscript, the first Temptation of Saint Anthony; he was almost 28 years old. In his book The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary, Mario Vargas Llosa describes Flaubert before this important reading: "We may be quite certain that he is happy, nervous, fearful of their verdict as he begins reading". The verdict, stated by Bouilhet:

We think you should throw it in the fire and never mention it again. 

Give up subjects so vague and diffuse that you're unable to get a grasp on them and bring them into focus; since you have an invincible tendency toward lyricism, you must choose a subject where lyricism would be so ridiculous that you'll be obliged to watch yourself and eliminate it..... 

The source of the story of the reading comes from Maxime du Camp's memoirs, so the absolute truth of them is questionable, but Vargas Llosa writes

Be that as it may, we have no reason to doubt his testimony that the verdict that he and Bouilhet handed down against the first Temptation was an extremely harsh one. 

Flaubert begins to be a great creator when he reacts against this lyrical, sentimental, romantic bent that predominates in his early writings, and here the sentence passed by Maxime and Louis in the course of that long night at Croisset played a capital role. The judgment of the two friends was not only a quite fair one; even more importantly, it was a useful one: it helped Flaubert become a different writer.

The powerful effect of this critique on Flaubert, turning him into the great artist that we now know, giving us Madame Bovary, made me think about a critique in my past that in a similar though less dramatic way, shifted the direction of my painting. I had just come back from Skowhegan, an intensive and exhilarating summer art school, where I had primarily studied with Gabriel Laderman. During the summer my work had moved from partially abstracted still lives to naturalistic perceptual work. Therefore, my plan for my second year of graduate school at Brooklyn College was to continue to make studies from life, of still life, of the figure, of the sky. When I explained this to my graduate advisor, Philip Pearlstein, he told me not to treat myself as a student, but as an artist. Just as Flaubert's friends told him to look close by for a subject, Philip said that I should look out my window, look at the neighborhood, find subjects around me that engaged me. But whatever I chose to do, take it seriously and take it as far as I could.

I felt at the time, and still feel, that this critique saved me from months and years of fruitless labor. Have you ever had life altering evaluation of your work?

What If.....?

Pierre Bonnard, Bather, 1935. Image courtesy WikiArt

I remember being stunned by Bonnard's late paintings in the 1998 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The color was brilliant and shimmering, and of a peculiar intensity; it was from this world but pushed beyond it, past the everyday.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bathtub, 1935. Image courtesy WikiArt

The paintings of bathers were especially compelling, along with the late self portraits. The woman in the bathtub seemed to hover between life and death. The woman pictured was always Marthe, Bonnard's wife and long time partner and muse. In his book of essays, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, Michael Kimmelman suggests that Bonnard's noticing of Marthe on a Paris street may have profoundly influenced his life and his work:

By one of those accidents of fate, in 1893 the painter Pierre Bonnard was walking down a street in Paris (or so the story goes) and he spied a young, elfin woman alighting from a tram....He followed her to work (it turned out that she sewed artificial pearls onto funeral wreaths). 

For the next half century, as Bonnard's biographer, Timothy Hyman, has put it, Marthe became "the defining figure of his life and work". Her increasing nervousness, her misanthropy, her jealousy and hypochondria conspired to determine what became their solitary and circumscribed life together. And that life, in turn, shaped Bonnard's path as an artist of ecstatic and inward-looking vision. 

Of course Kimmelman points out that no art is defined by any one thing, but he does believe that Bonnard's meeting with Marthe, and their life together, was a strong influence on his painting:

...[Bonnard] dated the birth of his painterly identity to shortly after they met. Had he walked down another street that day, or had he looked the other way when she stepped off the tram, or had he not pursued her....he might have met another woman and pursued a different life.

Philip Pearlstein, Female Nude on Yellow Drape, 1965. Image courtesy Betty Cunningham Gallery.

Lois Dodd, Wild Geraniums, 1967. Image courtesy NY Times.

I'm a Brooklyn kid, so when it came time to go to college, Brooklyn College seemed the logical choice. There I studied with Philip Pearlstein and Lois Dodd, among others; it was there that my path as a representational painter was laid out. But what if I'd gotten on the subway into Manhattan and gone to Hunter College instead, along with a good neighborhood friend of mine?

Robert Morris, Untitled, 1967-8, remade 2008. Image courtesy Tate Gallery.

Tony Smith, Untitled, 1962. Image courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

The emphasis at Hunter was on abstraction, with the faculty including Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Ralph Humphrey, Ron Gorchov. I believe I would have been a very different painter, one with the same sensibility, but a very different style. Instead of a late, slow turn toward abstraction, I might have begun there. Who knows? It's fun to think how a single choice or action could have changed our lives. The singer John Hartford wrote a very funny song about the role of chance, which you can hear at the link: "I Would Not Be Here" ..."if I hadn't been there"....which goes on and on and on, back and back.....because of this and that and that and that; it becomes absurd. So perhaps it's best not to think about it. 

At the Frost Place

Up a gravel path, past the lupins, is a modest white house perched on a hill. This is The Frost Place, where Robert Frost lived with his family for five years, from 1915 to 1920, and for 19 summers thereafter. In 1976 the town of Franconia, NH, where the house is located, bought the farmhouse and land and established a board of trustees to oversee what became an "educational center for poetry and the arts".  Frost had first visited the White Mountains in 1907, staying in the town of Bethlehem; he said about the area that "there is a pang there that makes poetry".

There is a beautiful, expansive view of the mountains from the front of the house, a view that was probably more open when Frost lived here.

Behind the house is a trail through woods that was started in 1997. This land had been meadow in Frost's time, but has since grown up in woods.

"Mowing"

This is the "Poetry and Nature Trail": as you walk on the path you can stop and read poems written by Frost while he was living here, poems with nature as their theme. I have a friend who was just telling me about how much she loved using her scythe; when I sent her the poem "Mowing" she felt that he "nailed it once again". 

To read all these poems, click on the photos to enlarge them. 

"Putting in the Seed"

For me he nails it with "Putting in the Seed", the "watching for that early birth/....

basil seedlings

....When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,/The sturdy seedling with arched body comes/...."

He captures the magic, the Love of it.

"The Sound of the Trees"

At my house the sound of trees is often one of storm, but their blowing and rustling is indeed more beautiful than many other noises that come from human activity. For all their activity the trees are immobile, stalwart, not like us with our moving on.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

"The Road Not Taken"

Many of the poems on the trail are famous ones, poems we think of when we think of Robert Frost. It was a pleasure to read them in this setting (and would have been even nicer if the swarms of bugs weren't so intense).

The staff at The Frost Place worked to establish native wildflowers along the trail and manage the forest. Then in 2007 two terrible windstorms undid all their work, so restoration work has been ongoing.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

A lesson from storms, from seasons, from life, is perfectly expressed in this brief poem, one that tugs at my heart. Through nature, Frost touched on deep human feelings.

An Exhibition

I am very pleased to be having a small exhibition at a curatorial project space, Some Walls, in Oakland, CA, directed by the artist and writer Chris Ashley. On view is a small selection of some of my work: paintings, boxed paintings, hooked wool drawings, and prints. At this link for the Some Walls website, you can see the work, and read a terrific essay that Chris has written about it; I feel very humbled by his words. I hope you will click through to the link and read it, for it has insights on my work that never occurred to me, and it's beautifully written.
(Be patient; some of the images take a few seconds to load).

Any of my friends living in the Bay Area can make an appointment to see the show, via an email address that you can find on the website. Let me know what you think if you do get a chance to go, and thanks to all my readers for your kind support of this blog.

William Carlos Williams: "no ideas but in things"

While I was composing my blog post on John Singleton Copley, which I had titled "The Primacy of the Object", I began thinking of the poet William Carlos Williams whose works focused on the things of this world. In his epic poem "Paterson", he repeated:

––Say it, no ideas but in things––

I confess myself to be a very poor reader of poetry; I have trouble with complex and allusive works. But when I read a Williams poem (especially the early ones), so direct, so visual, so attentive to the world, I am moved. One of my favorite poems is "Pastoral":

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colors. 

        No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.

Why is it that this final thought goes straight through my heart? something simple––a beautiful color––not at all important, and yet yes, for me this small noticing is at the center of life's meaning. I just read an exhilarating lecture by Allen Ginsberg, given in 1975 at the Naropa Institute, "An Exposition of William Carlos Williams' Poetic Practice" in the book The Teachers and Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. In it he quotes from an essay of Williams:

But the thing that always stands permanently in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty which sets a value upon all works of art, and makes them a necessity.

Ginsberg adds: "So 'no ideas but in things', or 'close to the nose'". When a student asks if the poem is so visual, why not take a photograph, Ginsberg responds that the writer is "practicing a speech consciousness, not an eyeball consciousness". As a visual artist, I try to practice that eyeball consciousness, related strongly to Williams' "no ideas but in things". A poem that sticks with me, its glittering image beautiful and hopeful amid detritus, is "Between Walls"

the back wings
of the 

hospital where
nothing  

will grow lie
cinders 

in which shine
the broken 

pieces of a green
bottle 

Williams' most famous poem is probably "The Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends
upon 

a red wheel
barrow 

glazed with rain
water 

beside the white
chickens

That "so much depends" focuses our attention on this object, at this moment the center of the world, an ordinary thing that becomes luminous, transcendent. Of this poem Ginsberg says:

I always figured that "so much depends" means he whole mind depends on the image. Or, "so much", a clear apprehension of the entire universe: just being there completely mindful––"I heard a fly buzz––when I died"––that's Emily Dickinson's line. 

 In an essay on Charles Sheeler Williams wrote:

The local is the universal.
Look! that's where painting begins. A bird, up above, flying, may be the essence of it––but a dead canary, with glazed eye, has no less an eye, for the well seen becomes sight and song itself. It is in things that for the artist the power lies, not beyond them. Only where the eye hits does sight occur. 

"It is in things....." and those things can simply be the paint and canvas, but paying attention is key. Here is one more Williams poem (you can find many more online) which Ginsberg called the "acme of tree description" and "a great poem", using the particularity of the tree's top to make it a unique portrait, "Young Sycamore":

I must tell you
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk
between the wet 

pavement and the gutter
(where water
is trickling) rises
bodily 

into the air with
one undulant
thrust half its height––
and then 

dividing and waning
sending out
young branches on
all sides–– 

hung with cocoons––
it thins
till nothing is left of it
but two 

eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the top 

"I must tell you" for me is like "so much depends", a call to see what is in front of our eyes, for it enlarges us. Allen Ginsberg ends his essay on Williams, who he calls a "true hero"by discussing his "poetic alchemy":

So––that's what he was trying to do, get that particular flower of perception blooming in America....trying to compose poems that are indistinguishable from the actual perceptions of our ordinary mind; but which when recognized, and appreciated consciously, transform the entire feeling of existence to a totally new sympathetic universe where we're at home, where we're playful, where we're generous, because the mind overflows with its perceptions, and the perceptions are all generous because they're not blocked with anger. 

This is Ginsberg seeing Williams through a Buddhist sensibility, but one attainable, and important, to us all.