American Modernism

Arthur Dove, Untitled, 1944, oil and tempera, 21 x 28 inches

Recently, a friend mentioned to me that my current compositions reminded her of this Dove painting, which interested me a lot. Arthur Dove was an early American modernist, who worked with abstract imagery for most of his career. His paintings are generally based on natural forms and often have a mystical bent, so I don't usually think of him as an influence. But this painting, with its circular ochre center, arms radiating, surrounded by red and blue windowed forms, seemed very related to my work. After seeing this painting, I looked at this photograph I'd just taken:

and there it was: a confluence of forms. I see that little fillip on the upper right as an organic addition, a little creature inhabiting the machine. I have previously written a post on Charles Sheeler, an American precisionist painter whose work I greatly admire; I also feel a kinship, as an American and a painter of machinery in whose forms I try to find abstract elements, to other American modernist painters. So I thought I'd present a few paintings of this era as an homage to their pioneering work of the early 20th century.

The New York art world busted loose of convention, found itself intensely shaken, by the Armory Show of 1913, which first exhibited modern European painters such as Picasso, Duchamp and Matisse alongside American artists. Here is an excellent site to guide you through that show, which opened America to modern abstract art. It was the beginning of a move from Impressionism and the Ash Can School to a new way of seeing, based on Cubism.

Charles Demuth, Machinery, 1920, tempera and pencil on cardboard

Louis Lozowick, Roofs and Sky, 1939, color silkscreen, 10 x 13 inches

These two works, by Charles Demuth and Louis Lozowick, both in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exemplify a focus of American painters: looking at the overlooked parts of our world related to industry and modern life. They went up to rooftops to gather images of things not usually seen, making them dramatic characters on the artistic stage. Demuth uses line and flat forms to abstract his objects, while Lozowick simplifies; both animate the objects: Machinery with undulating arms and Roofs and Sky by creating an intense sentinel presence, as though Darth Vader had landed on a NYC roof.

Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1921, oil on canvas, 33 1/4 x 18 inches

The work of Stuart Davis seems to me to be very close to that of European modernists, especially cubist collage, in his use of text and objects of ordinary life. His paintings are more akin to jazz, with their bright colors and rhythms.

Elsie Driggs, Queensborough Bridge, 1927, oil on canvas, 40 1/2 x 30 1/4 inches

Elsie Driggs was considered a Precisionist, along with Sheeler, Demuth, Lozowick and others, who saw industry as a positive force in modern life and a essential subject for painting. They used differing levels of abstraction, generally with clearly defined edges of forms, hence the "precision". Sometimes it seems as though they didn't really understand the cubism they were trying to emulate, as with Driggs and Demuth's radiating lines in the images reproduced here. But what is clear is the celebration of the newly built––here a bridge anointed with streaming light––and the power of the machine, a romance now long dead.

Oscar Bluemner, Red House, Madonna, 4 x 3 1/8, watercolor and pencil on paper

Georgia O'Keefe, New York with Moon, 1925, oil on canvas

Some American modernists looked around them for subjects, finding interest in land or city, seeing it through eyes tempered by acquaintance with European art. I've always liked the work of Oscar Bluemner, whose paintings are saturated with rich color and made up of geometric, weighty forms. O'Keefe has become such an artistic institution in the United States that it's hard to remember that her work was very avant garde for the time. Her early paintings of New York City are marvelous evocations of light and space, dramatic and claustrophobic, true portraits of the city.

These are my ancestors. There is the clarity of space and form, the insistence on the object, in their work that I associate with an American style; these characteristics go back to American Luminist landscape of the 19th century. "What is American about American Art?" is a topic for another day, but I believe these painters took a European style and made it their own, bequeathing to us a great tradition of looking at the modern world through a simplifying lens.

Roses

The month of June is when my flower gardens are most beautiful; I try to have perennials blooming throughout the season, but nothing can compete with all these happening at once: the roses, peonies, and irises, the white flowering viburnums, the Miss Kim lilac, the blue flowers of baptisia and the frothy yellow blooms of lady's mantle. The roses are early this year, so I will get to enjoy them for a while before the insects start chewing. Some of the roses were here when I moved in, like the wild pink rose you see above, and the two below. You can see the canes of this single pink growing along roadsides, in fields, even in the woods. Here, it sends up very tall, arching canes from the stone wall alongside my house, looking very pert and pretty with its single pink flowers.




This is a very small double wild rose growing in the backyard. It was a lot of work to make what had been a mass of weeds and rose canes into a circular bed of tiny flowers sparkling in the center of the yard.




A truly wonderful double red rose is now a large shrub on the east side of my house, where it is protected from the harsh winter winds. I had found some rose branches growing in the lawn to the west of the house, where they are constantly being mowed down, so I transplanted a couple of pieces and have been rewarded with this old fashioned, deeply scented flower. It doesn't keep long in a vase, but is worth bringing in anyway because of its wonderful fragrance.




I planted these last two rugosas myself, from bare root stock, and they've done pretty well here. The white is growing along the stone wall at the rear of my backyard; I love its delicate papery blooms and the buds in very pale pink. Luckily I don't mind it spreading, because it's a very vigorous plant. It's a perfect height for the spot, growing only about 3 feet tall, while the pink below, growing along the west wall of the barn, is a tall rose, beautiful against dark wood. The stamens of these roses are a gorgeous, furry deep yellow, little feet waving about in the air, attracting busy pollinating insects, who have interests other than aesthetic in visiting the flowers.

Berry

Berry, hand-dyed wool on linen, 10 x 10 inches

Here is Berry, with all its irregular geometry: corners pushing and pulling, circle wandering at edges, yellow "bell" curving. I like the color relationships (and for an odd reason, blogger has this post's images darker, rather than the usual lighter, than the original.) I wrote about the idea behind this image here.

This is a detail so you can see the color variations in the wool more clearly, as well as the hooking pattern. And below, because I know many readers like to see work in context, is the new ruglet hung on my kitchen wall along with my two most recent paintings. With a grouping like this, I am reminded how much my textile work has influenced my paintings.

A Walk in the Woods: Varnished Shelf Mushrooms

The mushroom season is beginning. During my walk yesterday I had a wow! moment when I noticed some gorgeous and wacky shelf mushrooms growing on a tree stump.




They start out as bulbous knobs, varnished a yellow-brown at their base, and then expand into a shelf form. They are like a group of cartoon characters out for a stroll, nodding to passersby, then tipping their hats.




This is what a more mature mushroom looks like, spread out into a fan, though here we have one that seems to have split into two, lying side by side. The top of this mushroom is a very shiny varnish, giving it a warm and juicy glow. It's underside is pure white, with no pores visible.



Here are two more of these beauties emerging from another stump, the top one seeming to be squeezing itself out from behind the bark, a soft, living thing bursting with growth.

One Finished Painting and One Underway

Corners, egg tempera on vellum, 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches

I titled this painting Corners because of the way the circle is nestled into the lower right part of the panel and the curved forms flow both towards the upper left, and the triangle at the lower right; and also because I thought that Cornered would sound too much like a film noir.

In a previous post on two cylindrical paintings, I wrote about how doing watercolor studies helped in working out their color. For this new painting, I thought I'd show the original photo and the study I did based on it.

I switched to gouache for this study, which I will use in future; its opacity is better suited to exploring color for egg tempera, rather than transparent watercolor. As you can see, the color is changed from the photo: I wanted a warmer yellow ochre, a more subdued red that acted more harmoniously with the yellow, and a black with ochre overtones rather than red ones and carrying more light. I hope that this works better than the photographic color. We can also see the difference between a hand made painting and a photograph, though the painting suffers from being seen on a screen, negating much of its presence.

When I finished Corners I started right away on a new painting, having 8 newly stretched parchment panels. This piece, which I'm tentatively calling Red Swoop––though here again I have a funny title in my head, Belly Laugh, because the image so reminds me of a rotund jolly belly (would that be too too silly?)––is 6 5/8 x 5 inches. You see it below with its first layers of paint, the drawing still very fluid. An issue with this piece will be how far towards realism to take the ground that the machine is sitting on; right now it's loosely brushed in green, as it is grass. I'm not sure if I want the grass to be delineated clearly, but doing that might make the image even more surreal than it looks now. The only way to find out is to paint.

A Walk in the Woods: The Shapes of Ferns

Ferns are the stars of the woods right now; with their bright new green leaves growing abundantly on the forest floor, they embody the idea of growth and renewal, and variety, because of their multiple leaf forms and habits. There is a fine toothed fern that spreads in large masses, catching the bright high sun of June, and looking like a soft thick carpet, or a frothy sea, that you can sink down into with pleasure.










I've enjoyed noticing the many different shapes of fern leaves, with edges from smooth to finely cut. The fern in the third image has what I've nicknamed baby-fingered leaves, reminiscent of babies' pudgy small hands. The last photo above is a plant I'd never noticed before; it has such an unusual growth pattern, with leaves spaced out along its narrow stems. Needless to say, I don't know the names of any of these ferns, except for the one below, my favorite, a maidenhair fern. It is beautiful, rising on a thin black stem which spreads into a circular pattern of delicate leaves, each leaf stem showing light black against the green. Touching the leaves is like fingering a very fine piece of silk charmeuse fabric. What a delightful plant!

The Scent of Spring Flowers

The sense of smell is an essential part of enjoying the pleasures of spring; from one bloom to another, we are transported by luscious aromas. The fragrances begin with scented daffodils and narcissus. The old fashioned flowers you see above were bequeathed to me by the previous owners, who had planted a large group of them under my leaning apple tree. They have a delightful scent, along with others I planted myself, each a variation on the theme of narcissus perfume.




After the common lilacs bloom, which waft a delightful fragrance throughout the yard, the lily of the valley begin. When I stepped out my back door, where they are spreading along the north wall under an American Cranberry, I was struck by their wonderful scent. A few sprigs in a vase perfumed the room.




These Lemon Lilies are the earliest daylilies to bloom, and the most fragrant. Their scent is rich and heavy, like extra sweet vanilla.



The last of the lilacs to bloom, the Korean lilac Miss Kim, is a beautiful shrub with flowers unlike those of most lilacs: tiny dark violet columns opening to four pale petals. They have a remarkable scent, different from other lilacs, but also heavenly and penetrating, flowing across the yard, filling the house from their vase.

And now roses are blooming; because of my northern location, I grow rugosas, which have a lovely smell. The peonies will soon bloom, with yet another beautiful scent. These perfumed riches make me wonder what it is about spring that causes flowers to be so fragrant? I can think of only one summer flower as intensely perfumed, and that is the oriental lily, unless I'm forgetting some. There are phlox that have a pleasant scent, although not very strong.

These wonderful fragrances also make me wish for a YouTube of smells, a way we could share aromas like a scratch and sniff in a magazine; I search for words to describe smells, but rarely succeed. So much of life is enhanced by the sense of smell; the scent of the woods after rain in spring is different from that in fall, and both heighten the visual and physical experience of walking woodland paths. A secret pleasure in growing tomatoes is the very particular smell of their leaves. When I visit a farm to photograph machinery, I wish I could share the rotting-sweet smell of the silage bunker, the thick not-unpleasant smell of the manure lagoon. Smells, scents, perfumes, odors, are an essential part of these worlds: garden, woods, farms, and certainly the city. Ah well, maybe someday....

Bright and Shiny

Bright and Shiny, egg tempera on vellum, 5 x 2 1/2 inches

This is one of those paintings that pleases me because it has an uncanny illusionism that I didn't quite expect. The green form, with its lines accentuating the movement in space, has a physical presence hanging on the wall which may be lost in reproduction. I also like the combination of colors and the bouncing, multi-colored light on the surface of the shiny object. It's a very different image from my previous painting, Ochre Shield. I enjoy moving from flat to round, simple to complex, exploring a range of compositions within my chosen field of vision.

Pond Life

I feel very lucky to have a small pond in front of my house; its calm, reflective surface, a break in the bright greens of lawn and trees, welcomes quiet contemplation. Years ago I put a few koi in the pond and they spawned and proliferated; my six koi became thirty or more; I loved watching them floating across the expanse of water. Then, four years ago, tragedy: when the pond thawed in spring, only two koi appeared; a predator must have fed on the fish. I placed a few more koi in the pond, and this spring, new little fish! I feel like a proud mama, watching the ten or so tiny koi beginning their lives amid the water plants.




There are all kinds of insects that enliven the pond; when I sit by the edge of the water on a warm day, I see bugs skittering across its surface, many tiny ones circling above it, and largest of all, the dragonflies, buzzing about. The most beautiful are the small electric-blue flying sticks; to see a group of them flying, their intense color showing bright against the dark green water, is a wonder. Then there are the much larger black and white dragonflies, one with dark wings, the other with wings of fine tracery, looking like a city street map. Hummingbirds and dragonflies move in a similar fashion, with wildly beating wings that disappear in movement; they both hover, and are similarly friendly and curious. When I am rocking on my porch, a flower-seeking hummingbird will sometimes pause for a few moments facing me; I like to imagine it is trying to figure me out. In a similar way, while sitting quietly at the pond, waiting for a dragonfly to alight on a twig for a photograph, it might hover in front of me for a brief time. It's pleasant to think of these events as a kind of communication, however limited.

(As always, you can click on the images to enlarge them and see more detail, even those of you who receive blog posts via email.)

Small Things

A watering can, a harrow left in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse––any of these can become the vessel of my revelation. Any of these things and the thousand similar ones past which the eye ordinarily glides with natural indifference can at any moment––which I am completely unable to elicit––suddenly take on for me a sublime and moving aura which words seem too weak to describe.

With these words and others in "A Letter", the fin de siecle Viennese writer Hugo von Hofmannstal sought to explain why he could no longer write poetry or prose; for him

Everything came to pieces, the pieces broke into more pieces, and nothing could be encompassed by one idea.

This modernist lament is part of a beautiful description, in words of ringing clarity and emotion, while declaring his inability to do so, of the surprising resonance of ordinary things.

At those moments an insignificant creature, an dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart path winding over the hill, a moss-covered stone mean more to me than the most beautiful, most abandoned lover ever did on the happiest night. These mute and sometimes inanimate beings rise up before me with such a plenitude, such a presence of love that my joyful eye finds nothing dead anywhere.

He yearns for a language

that is not Latin or English, or Italian, or Spanish, but a language of which I know not one word, a language in which mute things speak to me...

Hofmannsthal's evocative prose reminds us of those times each of us has been in, as he puts it, "the present, the fullest, most sublime present". There are moments when I feel as though my chest (my heart? my lungs?) is swelling with expanding happiness; it can happen looking at landscape, light on a leaf, a bug; it is more than an aesthetic response, it is physical, in the body. When I was in the garden photographing the watering can as illustration for this post, I turned and saw these rocks, nestled tenderly against one another. The photo doesn't come close to expressing the poignancy of that small group. Last week, sitting on my porch, looking across the lawn and field towards the dark curtain of surrounding trees, I became aware, for the first time, of the many points of flittering light: insects of different types and sizes, catching the sun and making air palpable; what had seemed empty was full.




Not all writers have given up on the power of language. I am inspired by prose writing such as that of Hofmannstal, of Willa Cather, of Samuel Beckett and have recently been reading poems by Amy Clampitt, thanks to a comment by a reader; her nature poems are densely worded meditations on the visual world, her words almost physical callings-up: of a marine surface she writes

his wind-silver
rumpling as of oatfields,
a suede of meadow,
a nub, a nap, a mane of lustre
lithe as the slide of muscle in its
sheath of skin,

And writing of an early powerful experience, her earliest memory, that may have made her a poet

...Deep in it, under
appletrees like figures in a ritual, violets
are thick, a blue cellarhole
of pure astonishment.

It's the phrase "pure astonishment" that moves me, takes me to the feeling; violets are not extraordinary things, yet can call up wonder. Another poet who notices the overlooked is William Carlos Williams. In The Red Wheelbarrow, he looks at the most ordinary of garden implements, and by the first three insistent words, helps us see it as a key to humankind, nature and the universe.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

A New Rug Hooking Project: Berry

A couple of weeks ago, on a post about blueberry blossoms, a reader commented on their similarity to the fruit. A little chime went off in my artist brain, and I did a series of sketches based on this idea. What I finally came up with alludes to the flower and fruit without precision; I chose yellow for the bell shape, as a contrast to the purple, which is closer to the hue of grape than blueberry; the ripply flourish at the blossom's opening is gone for simplicity's sake.

When I work on a sketch for a ruglet, I keep my dye sample book in front of me as an aid for color mixing; by checking the available dyes, I have a better idea of colors I will need. The pencil notes you see under the watercolor remind me which dyes I plan to use.




I dip dyed the end of the yellow wool into light green so I can give the bell form a slight sense of volume; the change will be very subtle. The purple wool has a nice variegated color range, created by crowding the wool in the dyepot so the dye doesn't reach all the material evenly; I love the color shifts that come from hand dyeing, which gives the work a quivering uncertainty, more lively than flat hues. I think these three colors are quite gorgeous together, and hope they look as good when hooked.




The hooking patterns for this piece, which is 10 inches square, are: following the outlines on bell and circle, and random for the green background. As the weather is a bit cooler, (we've had a lot of much warmer than normal temperatures), I can enjoy sitting and working with wool on my lap.

Rhubarb Jam

The rhubarb plant is a magnificent specimen, with enormous ruffly leaves hiding a brilliant treasure. When I moved to this house, there was some rhubarb growing next to the stone wall in the backyard; it was an old fashioned variety, with very sour green stalks. I planted this red rhubarb, which in addition to making pretty sauces, pies and jam, is a bit less tart. Its location alongside the compost pile is perfect for a big, hungry plant.




Rhubarb stalks, which are classed as a vegetable but we think of as a fruit, are the only edible part of the plant. The sweet/tart flavor of rhubarb desserts isn't for everyone, but if you love rhubarb as I do, then making jam is an essential rite of the season.




The recipe for rhubarb jam is very simple:

4 pounds rhubarb, cut into 1 inch lengths
4 pounds sugar

1. Layer rhubarb and sugar in a large bowl and let sit overnight. Above is a photo of the sugar beginning to draw the juice from the rhubarb the next morning, the bits of fruit looking like jewels strewn in icy snow.
2. Put the rhubarb sugar mixture in a large pot (I use stainless), bring to a boil, then cook at a rolling boil till thick, about 1 hour.
3. Since I've made a lot of jam, I can tell when it's thick enough to set. I don't find candy thermometers useful, but a good method is the refrigerator test: put a bit of jam on a plate and put in the freezer for 5 minutes; if it sets, it is ready.
4. Put into pint jars and process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. If you are without a canner, I think freezing would also work.

The recipe makes about 5 pints of delicious ruby-red jam.