Opposing Angles

Opposing Angles, 2009, 12 x 12 inches, egg tempera on panel






Opposing Angles is now finished. I find the geometry of this painting quite satisfying, and hope that the light and color add warmth to what might be seen as a rather severe image. Using a delicate but active brush, I painted a surface that speaks of the artist's hand, but not too loudly. This is one of the most simple compositions I've painted, and points toward my love of minimalist painting, a love clearly evident in my ruglets. I sometimes think that my paintings may become even more spare in the future.

I have a small bit of dissatisfaction: it is not clear enough that the broad triangular plane is not parallel to the picture plane, but is moving forward in space. I worked on that quite a bit, using color and value to bring the front edge forward, but I think that our visual response to the two dimensional design is so strong that it overpowers the spacial design. But maybe you, the viewer, don't see it that way.

Autumn Color: Spirea

Through the snow, and leaves coloring and falling, the small spirea in front of my little porch hasn't given up on blooming. I cut off the large main flower heads in late summer when they started to go to seed, which allowed the side shoots to grow and flower. And though most have turned brown as they move towards reproduction, there are flashes of deep pink/red amidst the still green leaves. It's cheering to see this color every time I enter the house.

Seeds and Berries

Lilac


Burning Bush


Coneflower


Siberian Iris


Fall is the time for the ripening of seeds and berries, and though the weather seems a bit like winter right now, plants are working on spreading their seed. I usually deadhead perennials so that the energy of the plant won't be directed towards reproduction, but a few have such lovely seed heads that I allow them to remain. Birds, especially chickadees, are attracted to the seeds of lilac and the berries of the burning bush; from now till spring I'll see them hopping about feeding on them. And next spring, new perennials will sprout where I hadn't planted them, a reminder of the fecundity of nature, whether welcome or not.

Fitz Hugh Lane

Entrance of Somes Sound from Southwest Harbor, 1852, 23 x 36 inches


Approaching Storm, Owl's Head, 1860, 24 x 40 inches


The Western Shore with Norman's Woe, 1862, 21 x 35 inches


Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove, 1864, 10 x 15 inches


After writing the post on John Peto, I thought that I'd like to discuss the work of another American 19th century painter whose work, I believe, has quite a lot in common with his: Fitz Hugh Lane. They are both painters of great reticence, presenting their subjects with a minimum of artistic personality; brushwork is restrained and the object maintains its integrity. There is a mood of introspection, of silence and thought. Compositions have a simple clarity; even though with Lane we see forms in deep space, it is evident that all are placed with the same eye towards structure and balance that is in Peto's work. And in both artists we see modesty in the size of their canvases, and an abiding interest in the ordinary. For Lane, who lived by the shore in Gloucester, Massachusetts, scenes of boats on water were of everyday life.

Another landscape painter of the same period, Frederick Church, is an artist of grand dramatic scenes, often of foreign lands, painted on huge canvases. His theatrical canvases, full of incident and swirling light, contrast strongly with the quiet ones of Lane. When we look at Lane's landscapes, we see a container of limpid light, with every thing in it as important as every other thing; each form has the artist's attention. Atmospheric perspective lightens and cools distant objects, but each maintains a crisp outline; as with Peto, knowledge is superior to vision. We are invited onto the shores, to feel the rocks, to contemplate the expansive space before us.

(The images were photographed from the exhibition catalogue, Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane, by John Wilmerding)

Cabbage with Pasta

Last night I made one of my favorite cabbage recipes: smothered cabbage with noodles. It's simple and tasty, and healthy too. It does take a while to cook the cabbage, because it has to slow cook till it softens and loses its volume. I don't remember where this recipe came from, but I've been making it for years. It's unlikely that I made it up because I'm good at picking recipes and following them, but I'm not a creative cook.

For two large servings, shred 1 1/2 pounds of cabbage. Chop 1 tablespoon of garlic and cook in a wide skillet in 2 tablespoons of olive oil till it starts to color. Add the cabbage and 1 tablespoon of salt and turn and mix with the oil and garlic. This amount of shredded cabbage will come to the top of a 12 inch frying pan. Cover the pan and cook on very low heat, stirring occasionally, for about an hour.




The cabbage will now look as above, very tender and slightly browned in spots. It becomes wonderfully sweet cooked like this.

I like this dish with a stronger tasting pasta, particularly either a whole wheat spaghetti, as below, or buckwheat noodles, which are a Japanese noodle called Soba. Use about 4 ounces of noodles for the 1 1/2 lbs of cabbage. Cook the pasta, add to the noodles, then add soy sauce to taste. The flavor of the soy sauce seems well suited to the sweet cabbage and enhances the final flavor.

Working on Opposing Angles, the Flat Plane

While working on my painting today, I thought a lot about the work of John Peto, which I'd discussed here. The intimacy of his paintings, and their delicate touch, seemed very relevant to my work now.

Yesterday, after hearing the weather forecast for the week––snow today, then continued cold––I decided to move my work from the big studio in the barn into the house, on a table under a skylight. Last year was the first time I did this, after getting a shockingly large heating bill for the studio in early winter. Because I was now doing some small work, it was possible to work seated at a table, which is how I used to paint my early egg temperas, rather than standing at an easel. I feel that I have a different physical relationship with the painting when I'm bent over it, seated on a stool: it becomes more intimate. Since I began this painting on an easel, the difference is notable to me.





In Peto's paintings, his brush sensitively finds the form and color, and adds enough texture to make each object an individual. The variations caused by wear and age seem to be a natural aspect of each thing; they don't overpower the essential form, as detail oriented painting often does. This was a lesson to me as I worked on the flat blue-green back plane of Opposing Angles. I began with a smaller #8 pointed brush, but realized that its marks were too fine, so switched to a #10. I worked mainly with a scumbling technique––putting a light value paint over a darker layer––while allowing for the color of a lower layer to affect one on top. In this way, painting loosely over and over, with an almost paste-like paint, I was able to get to a surface with very subtle color variations. This is definitely not traditional egg tempera technique, but it works so well with this semi-translucent, fast-drying paint.

Snow!

I woke this morning to a white world, more usual in late November than mid October. I've never seen this much snow––about 3 inches––so early in the season in the fifteen winters that I've lived here. Blinky the cat is contemplating going out into it, trying to remember if he's ever seen anything like it.




It's really odd to see snow covering fall foliage, to see orange shining out against the white snow.




The White Ash tree in the backyard, its branches burdened with snow, has bowed towards the ground.

As the morning progresses, the wet snow has started to recede, melting and dropping from leaves and branches. It will probably be a memory by this afternoon.

Fall Harvest

Yesterday, a hard frost was predicted for overnight, so I decided to bring in the cabbages, which were still growing in the garden. I had a terrific cabbage harvest, with 7 huge heads, each from 7 to 8 pounds. I guess I'll be eating a lot of cabbage this winter. Luckily, it keeps very well, till April or May, wrapped in newspaper (this year they're so big I used brown paper) and stored in the root cellar. The cellar in this old house is dirt floored, therefore damp, which is ideal for storing cabbage and root crops. It's not quite cold enough: perfect for potatoes, a bit warm for carrots and beets because of the furnace that runs occasionally, but it serves its purpose quite well.





Today, sunny but cool, was a good time to dig beets and carrots. The forecast for tonight has the "s" word: snow. Too early for that. The carrot harvest was middling, and the beet yield was not very good, likely because of the cool summer weather. What was great for cabbage wasn't so good for root crops. I store the beets and carrots in pails and boxes in the root cellar, covering them with sand and peat moss which helps keep moisture in the vegetables. I occasionally water the sand so that it doesn't dry out, and cover it with plastic. The crops still in the garden are just the very hardy ones: kale, brussels sprouts, and leeks. Now my meals come from storage areas in the house and from the garden, a sure sign that fall is advancing.

Loop de Loop

Loop de Loop, 2009, 12 x 24 inches, hand-dyed wool on linen


I finished Loop de Loop, after some color changes: one of the blue squares was too light and gray, so I pulled it out and made it closer to the other blues; I felt that one red section needed to be the brighter rather than darker red. I'm pleased with how the pale yellow sits in the background and doesn't compete with the frames for attention, while still acting as a primary color. I hope that when you look at this image, your mind completes the arc of the loop, adding its missing parts, creating movement across the surface.

Red Lentil Soup

No, I can't grow lentils in northern Vermont, but this soup is so easy and delicious and perfect for fall and winter days (it's been my lunch for the past couple of days), that I can't resist giving you the recipe. It's a soup I grew up with, a middle eastern recipe from my mother's kitchen. You start with tiny red lentils which, when cooked, break apart and change to a greenish color in a soup.




Ingredients1 Tbs chopped garlic
2 Tbs olive or vegetable oil
8 cups water
2 cups red lentils
1 Tbs salt
1 Tbs ground cumin
juice of half a lemon

Cook the garlic in the oil till starting to color, then add water and bring to a boil. Add salt and lentils; simmer, covered, till lentils have broken apart, about 45 minutes. Add the cumin and cook a few minutes longer. Add the lemon juice and serve.

Planting Garlic

In this climate zone, we plant garlic in mid October, a few weeks before the ground freezes in order that the roots have time to begin to grow before winter. I decided to plant today, even though it was cold and blustery (I don't like being out in the wind), because it looked like the rest of the week wasn't going to be any better. I had already prepared the row by loosening the soil and adding compost, so all I had to do was place the cloves in a furrow and cover with earth. I had a wonderful garlic crop this year, harvested in early August; I chose the largest bulbs and broke them into cloves, which I planted about 4 or 5 inches apart in the row. Each clove will develop into a full bulb of garlic, another of those miracles of growth which stun me when I stop to think about them.

A New Rug Hooking Project: Quadrants

I'm almost finished with Loop de Loop so have been thinking about the next ruglet. After writing the post "Shapes", I realized that I hadn't done a shaped work in a long time so did a couple of pages of sketches. I was intrigued by the idea of doing a pair of quarter circles: they look as though they're spinning or twirling around each other. I found a couple of wool remnants that gave me a color idea, the complementary colors of orange and blue. The dyeing process today didn't go easily, as my try for turquoise turned to green; I then accepted a blue that is not turquoise but looks strong against the yellow/orange.

When thinking about a title for this piece, I'd first thought of "Slices", as in pie or pizza. Maybe it's a better title (any thoughts?) but the reference seemed too particular. I'm rather torn, because slices is a bit funny as quadrants is not. I used the title "Fruit Slices" for a piece based on the jellied candy.....hmmm.

A Fall Meal

The recent cold weather has caused me to fire up the woodstove to warm the house. I have a cookstove with an oven and plenty of stovetop for cooking, and though the firebox is small, the stove manages to keep the house warm during all but the most bitterly cold weather. When the stove is going, I often roast vegetables in its oven; last night was the inaugural baking of the small winter squash Sweet Dumpling. This is a delicious one or two serving squash that has a rich sweet flavor and creamy texture, with none of the cloying sweetness of Delicata, a winter squash of similar color to Dumpling. To roast the squash, cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, oil the cut sides and place them face down on a baking pan. Then roast at 400º till done.

To complete my meal, I picked some brussels sprouts, which I steamed, then added a bit of butter. Both these vegetables have such wonderful flavor that they don't need much enhancement. Eating these seasonal foods, cooked on the woodstove, is an almost ceremonial entrance into a new season, pointing to more changes ahead.

Working on Opposing Angles

This new painting is underway as I layer on color and draw the subject more exactly. After transferring the drawing, doing an underdrawing in ink, and putting on the first layers of color, I use a ruler and pencil to measure and draw the main elements of the composition. Today I painted several coats of color to build up a solid looking surface. I'm finding that, more and more, it's essential to the resolution of the painting to have innumerable layers of paint, almost as if I were constructing the object itself.

We spoke a bit about rust in the comments on Red Cone; in this painting the rust, which is almost a complementary color to the blue/green of the painted machine, creates an important structural design of bold diagonal and horizontal.

Autumn Color: Landscape

At times today, the air seemed to be reflecting the color of the trees, as though the oranges and golds and reds were becoming particulate and were floating into the atmosphere. The fall is beginning to end, as leaves lose their tenuous hold and flutter onto the ground, and branches become lines in space again.

Geometry in Nature and Art

A few days ago on my walk, I noticed that a lot of pine cones were littering the ground, so picked a couple of them up and carried them home. Looking at the spiral form of the cone took me back to graduate school, where many of us were neo-classicists in inclination, so learned about and used the Golden Section, or Mean, or Ratio, in composing our paintings. This ratio is expressed in different ways, one of which is: in a divided line, the proportion of the longer segment to the shorter is the same as the longer to the whole line. Expressed as a number, it is approximately 1.618. This mean was supposed to allow for perfect proportion, and some ancient buildings, possibly the Parthenon, were designed using it. The amazing thing about all this is that things in the natural world conform to this number, such as the spiral of the pine cone, or the arrangement of leaves and sprouts on a brussels sprouts plant.



The golden mean is also expressed as numbers in a Fibonacci sequence. In the image below, we can see how a spiral is created starting with two squares of 1, then to a square with a side of 2, then adding to that a square of 2 + 1, giving us 3, and so on for the sequence of 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. It's remarkable how orderly nature is.




The following illustration shows how to draw a Golden Rectangle, which is supposed to be an ideal shape. Finding the center of a square, draw a diagonal to the corner and use that line as a radius to draw a circular arc; where it hits the continuation of the square is the golden rectangle.






For many artists, using these proportions was a way to achieve pleasing compositions. Many years ago I painted figure compositions, inspired by painters such as the fifteenth century Italian painter Piero della Francesca, and used the golden section for main compositional elements. In The Flagellation of Christ, Piero seems to have composed this rather remarkable painting (in that the main subject of the picture is in the background) as a series of golden rectangles. It has great power in its geometry and emotional solemnity.

Although I'm no longer interested in using a geometric ideal to compose my paintings, I find it fascinating that this ratio, intrinsic to the natural world, has engaged mathematicians, architects, and artists for centuries.

John F. Peto

Help Yourself, 1881, 8 x 10 inches


Cup, 1890s, 6 x 9 inches


Quill in Inkwell, Book and Candle, 1894, 9 x 6 inches


Letter Rack on Black Door, 1895, 30 x25 inches


I'd like to return to my musings on our responses to paintings and to objects (in posts "Giorgio Morandi" and "American Art Pottery") by writing about another still life artist I greatly admire: John Peto. Peto is an American artist of the late 19th century whose work reveals a very different approach to the problem of vision and representation than that of Morandi; rather than exploring the ambiguity of perception, Peto presents us with tactile things, seeming solid in real space. In some ways, this brings his paintings closer to actual objects: they were often classified as trompe l'oeil but this is too simple a description. In her book American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, Barbara Novak calls the American painting of John Singleton Copley a "kind of ideal or conceptual realism"; "the object as it were presents itself, and the result is a higher coefficient of reality, making the real somehow more than real."

Peto's paintings, in their clear, simplified form and rigorous compositions, are perfectly described as "conceptual realism". His much more popular contemporary, William Harnett, to whom Peto is often compared, made paintings that were an accretion of detail, where the idea of "fooling the eye" seems paramount; because of this, his works are, to me, only a tour de force performance of no great depth.

I also think of Peto as a very American artist in his emphasis on tactile form; things exist as our hands and our mind know them, not just our eyes. If we look at the work of Chardin, the great 18th century still life and figure painter, we can see edges dissolving and light flickering over surfaces as a restless eye moves over and around the still life. Peto's objects are pictured in a calm, even light, which helps them achieve, in their plain ordinariness, a poetic transcendence through his loving and attentive hand.

(these works were photographed from the 1983 catalogue of the Peto show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Important Information Inside by John Wilmerding.)

Study for "Opposing Angles"

I haven't worked on a 12 inch square for quite some time, so thought it would be fun to do so after the larger Red Cone. I chose a study that was a cool color after painting two works––Red Cone and Yellow Curve––whose main colors were on the warm side of the spectrum. I like the very simple geometry of this image, with 2 strong diagonals and a horizontal dominating the composition.

Late Apples

Today when I went for a walk, I noticed that an apple tree by the side of the road, which had been loaded with dark red apples, was now dropping them; they were lying ripe on the ground. I tasted one, and it had great flavor, tart with a hint of sweetness: "winey". I'd never gathered apples from this tree before, but felt it would be a shame to pass these up, even with their blemishes. I also picked a few of the sweet tasting, greenish yellow apples from the tree just to the west of my house, which have a flavor similar to that of a Golden Delicious. I've heard late ripening apples called "winter apples", because they tend to be good keepers. I now have a large bowl of these unnamed apples in my refrigerator, ready for fresh eating in the weeks ahead.

Autumn Color: Forest Floor

The fall here has been so beautiful that I can't resist running out and photographing its color again and again. Yesterday I took these photos of fallen leaves: on a moss covered stone, part of the stone wall bordering the south side of my property, and on the woodland path. The scent in the woods is now the marvelous spicy odor particular to this time of year, possibly caused by the leaves now carpeting the trail.

Red Cone

Red Cone, 2009, 26 x 18 inches, egg tempera on panel




I think I've finished the painting Red Cone (I have to live with it for a while to see whether or not it needs any tweaking.) It turns out that the layers and layers of paint that I struggled with, mentioned in the "ugh" post, did help as a foundation for the final layers. You can see something of the paint handling in the detail: using round brushes, I attempted to both follow the form and make lively marks. Using brushstrokes and color changes––warmer color toward the bottom of the cone form as it moves forward––I attempt to achieve the illusion of an volume in space. Clicking on the images above will take you to enlargements which will give you more information.

I could have called this painting something like "many curves" because of the swooping curves both in the drawing on the surface, and in its form: the curve outwards of tires, of cone, of yellow "hat". I like the plainness of the bottom of the image against the complexity of the top; the large sweep of the cone's curve against the small cylinders of the pipes. And red is such an interesting, difficult, and dynamic color to work with. I leave it to you, my readers, to figure out any metaphors suggested by the image.

A note on the photographs of paintings: they are often frustrating in their move to the blog. I carefully work on color accuracy when I shoot my finished work; using camera raw for shooting, I print out the image and check it with the original. In the printout of the painting, the color is very accurate, but the jpeg above is not. The enlargement, seen when you click the image, will be closer to the painting color, though a little too dark. The detail on this page is closer to the actual color than the image of the entire painting; I have no idea why this happens. Very annoying.

Autumn Color: Maple Leaves

In my posts on autumn, how could I not publish photos of the state tree of Vermont, the sugar maple? When we think of a New England fall, the image that comes to mind is that of the flaming leaves of this maple tree, which also provides us with maple syrup in early spring. The trees show a variety of color, from a deep red, through orange and deep yellow. The color is at its peak in the higher hills around here; at my house, which is at 1300 feet of elevation, it is approaching peak color. Looking at the vivid hues around me, there's a sense that it's all rather miraculous; even though I see this display year after year, it always surprises and delights.