"You the Living": A Black Human Comedy

Five cooks stand staring out a window; they are partially hidden and separated from the gray world.

They are replaced at the window by one man, and slowly moving past outside is an old man with a walker. He walks with difficulty, bent over, and pulling something behind him.

When I saw what he was dragging––a small dog wrapped up in his leash––I burst out laughing, and kept on laughing with great hilarity. I wanted to kick myself to stop: stop it! the poor dog! but it was so darned funny: aren't we just like that, dragging a life burden that needn't be one; we make our inattentive selves miserable. This was just one small scene among many, a favorite one, in the film You the Living by the Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. As I was thinking about how to approach writing about Andersson's unique sensibility––mordant, sensitive, critical, loving––and his demanding aesthetics––all the sets in the 50 short segments except for one were constructed on a large sound stage––I thought of Balzac and his Comédie Humaine. Both artists attempt to show life in all its complexity and misery, its desires and disappointments, though Andersson is a lot funnier. He is famous in Sweden as a maker of commercials and you can get a sense of his way of seeing by watching a few of them at this link. I'm sure that his use of short pieces in a feature film was influenced by this work.

You the Living begins with a quote from Goethe, and we later see a bus with Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Hades, as its destination:

Be pleased then, you the living one, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.

We are so often not pleased: we whine, we yearn, we complain; we are sad, feel unloved, unappreciated. A recurring character in the film is a big woman who keeps telling her boyfriend to leave, that no one likes her, no one understands her....go go away. He tries and tries to cheer her up, but it's only when he tells her he has to go home because the oven is on, and that there's a veal roast cooking, does she say that she'll come by later. In the commentary, Andersson explains why he only shows the lives of ordinary people:

I believe that art is universal, both in a geographical and social sense. Art defends man regardless of standing because deep down we are all so very alike.....we all need respect, attention, and love.

There is a great deal of wonderful music in this film, including Dixieland, and offbeat instruments like this sousaphone, not much appreciated by spouses. All these sets were constructed, a work of several years, so the view through a doorway––a place for a figure to stand––with a slight glimpse of another room, is planned. The colors are all grays. The camera does not move. The picture on the wall at left falls into the fish tank from the noise.

Andersson spoke a lot about politics in his commentary, and here is a segment on class: the window washer, wearing workman's blue, is standing outside the posh gallery while the man inside points to spots that he sees; the window washer obediently takes a rag to each spot pointed out. The gallery person is ridiculous and the workman dignified. But I tend to see a larger, more metaphoric meaning in many of these sketches: we can think about how we too often look towards tiny imperfections and let them ruin something beautifully done.

This is an important scene, another setting in a room looking out into a hallway and more doors (and notice the Blossfeldt print hanging on the wall); it reminds me of the Dutch painter de Hooch who often painted rooms opening onto doorways. The doctor is a psychiatrist, worn out and very unhappy, funny in his gray affectlessness; he complains about his patients

...who want me to help them have fun. They demand to be happy at the same time as they are egocentric, selfish, and ungenerous. 

He has given up on trying to make mean people happy; instead he prescribes pills, lots of pills. Why this bleak assessment of humanity can also be humorous is one of the mysteries of this film. We are forced to look at ourselves and realize, yeah, we're pitiful creatures, aren't we? and have a rueful laugh over it.

In a small church, a wry twist on a familiar scene of a woman kneeling and praying "Forgive those....", but her list of people to be forgiven keeps going and going and is not the usual sinners, and she goes on and on and on while the person patting her back wants her to get up so they can leave. Her list includes:

those who are greedy and cheap
who grow rich by paying miserable wages
who withhold the truth from the people
who are heartless, merciless, and quick to pass judgment
newspapers and TV channels that mislead, that distract attention from that which is important
  

Two people recounted dreams in the film: first a terrible dream of a cement worker who found himself in the home of a rich family, with a dinner table set with 200 year old family china. He prepares to do the tablecloth trick, but instead of all the dinnerware staying on the table, it comes tumbling down and breaking, revealing Nazi swastikas hidden under the cloth. He is put on trial for destroying the china and is sentenced to death by beer-drinking judges. It is the justice system run amok. When the electric chair technician has to check an instruction manual, the humor turns very black.

There was another dream, one of sheer beauty and kindness and love: a young woman meets a rock musician in a bar and falls yearningly in love with him. Her dream shows their little home after the wedding, and their blissful union. He plays a beautifully on the guitar while they look at each other sweetly. Soon I noticed that the scene out the window was changing, as though this very ordinary apartment was a moving train.

Their little home pulls into a station, where a large crowd of well wishers greets them with shouts of congratulations; it is an extraordinary moment. Ah, if only the world could be this generous, this perfect. But the young woman does not have her dream fulfilled.

And...we are all doomed: the bombers will come and life will end. Andersson spoke of the tragedies of the bombing of innocent people, all those leading ordinary lives. I see this final scene less as a political statement than as a metaphor for the death that will come to us all; so, as Goethe wrote, we living ones should be pleased with the life given us before then.

A New Painting: "Dark Ellipse"

Dark Ellipse, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 6 1/4 x 8 in.

One thing that I like about doing small paintings which use details of agricultural machinery as their compositions is that I can find many motifs within a small area. In the case of Dark Ellipse, I did another painting based on the same machine, Angles and Bar, which you can see here. That painting stepped back, while this one zooms in. In Angles and Bar, the ellipse is flattened but here it is very subtle. The flat plane is contrasted with shadowed angles above it. 

Dark Ellipse detail

Light catches a form mostly hidden in dark, the recess in contrast to the bright yellows above; even those in shadow carry warmth (a challenge to paint).

Small Wonders

Each year I plant vegetable seeds in the garden at their optimum times, preparing the soil for good growth. Each year I watch the bare ground for signs of germination, and each year without fail I get excited by the bits of green emerging. This loop of green is characteristic of beans when they germinate......

....and the seed itself rises above the soil, soon to show young leaves, while a root pushes into the ground.

Corn sends up furled green points that enlarge and become complex.

Parsnips have just germinated so are not showing their true frilled leaves yet....

 

....while carrots are farther along, so have some true leaves showing....

....as do the beets. But they are always recognizable by their red shoots.

This emergence, this growth, is all quite ordinary, but sometimes I stop to think about it and it truly amazes me: how is it that this tiny seed (Wikipedia has a wonderful article on the history and character of seeds) carries the information to become a particular large plant? (oh, I know it's DNA, but how remarkable!); how is it that a large plant begins here and with just water and the nutrients in the soil grows and grows, and in turn produces seed? Looked at it this way, life is a miracle, for animals as well as plants, each with their reproductive strategy. Sometimes I just can't comprehend it; it's too vast. It's no wonder that over millennia so much magic has surrounded life and growth.

Life is so persistent that plants come up unexpectedly, like this volunteer tomato plant. Its seed came from last year's tomatoes, fallen on the ground. It will never mature in time, so I weed out the volunteers. A weed is simply an unwanted plant, usually wild.

This dill seedling is another volunteer, but I'll allow this one to grow since it's in a convenient spot.

In a cultivated garden, we are always challenged by abundant life where we don't want it: here weeds and flowers––annual poppies, purslane, some kind of grass––growing alongside the leek. Their seeds were scattered last summer and fall, and with the spring warmth they've germinated. I allow some poppies to grow in other parts of the garden; their papery red blossoms are a joy. And I never have to plant their seeds, since they return each year, self-seeded time and time again. Some seeds have to be nursed along, others will burst forth robustly; all have small, undistinguished beginnings, but grow determinedly into their own plant character. How marvelous!

My Changing Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Batch of Small Drawings

sd 33, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

Working on this series of small drawings allows me to play––to loosely improvise in a painterly way––which is very different from the style of my other projects (which also makes me more uncertain about them). I do the major part of the painting, using 2 inch wide brushes, with the colors I've mixed that day for the ground colors of my larger drawings. You can see the finished drawings from this session here; their colored grounds influence these small works. I haven't before named the paint that I use for laying down that color: I mix powdered pigment with a gelatin size solution, which is a distemper. From now on I'll be more clear about the medium rather than just saying "hand toned". So, in sd 33, the orange and blue arcs are painted in distemper; the small oval at top is egg tempera, added later. I thought it brought more whimsy to what was already a playful image.

sd 34, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

This piece is much more somber. The distemper is the brown and gray, with added thick lines in egg tempera. It would have been possible to change the tone by doing something different with the added paint, but I stuck with the vertical/horizontal, darkly colored theme. 

sd 35, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

One thing that's great about this medium is that it is quick drying, which allows for translucent layering of color. I pinned down the flowing shapes with a small gray-blue square.

sd 36, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

sd 36 is an instance when I took a mistake and used it: some small drops of dark paint fell on the bottom of the sheet, so I widened them a bit, then added two more lines of drops.

sd 37, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

I've already noticed a sad tendency on my part to repeat myself, to find a comfortable form and repeat it: a horizontal band at top and a vertical one on the right side. I did it in sd 35 and sd 39 and sd 37 above. I got annoyed with myself, so I turned this one on its side, then added the orange mark in egg tempera.

sd 38, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

A layer of opaque dark red floats over color that is more transparent. The blue rectangle rises above the other layers, or maybe just holds them in place.

sd 39, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

I tend to add very little in egg tempera to these drawings; here it's just the ocher rectangle at the bottom left.....

sd 40, egg tempera with distemper on paper, ca. 7 x 7 in. 

....and here the three horizontal blue lines. They are finishing touches, of a more controlled sort.

Tulip Festival

Each fall I plant a row of tulips in my vegetable garden, where they will be protected from admiring deer who think they are delicious. Each spring I have vases and pitchers of tulips gracing the house, where I can admire their form and watch them change over time until they drop their petals. And each spring since 2010 I have photographed the tulips and shared them in a blog post: here are links to the posts from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. The unnamed tulip above (I often get incorrectly labeled bulbs) has a classic tulip shape, with rounded petals forming a perfect cup.

The tulip is such an elegant flower that it brings order to my messy desk.

I was drawn to photograph single flowers this year, so as to highlight their color and shape. This tulip, which came in the same bag as the first one, is clearly not the same variety. It has the same perfect shape, but its petals are lightly flecked with pale yellow, and its base is white, not green.

This dark red tulip has dramatic darker purplish flames rising up on its slightly fringed petals.

Lily-flowered tulips are among my favorites. Their narrow pointed petals are beautiful in different stages: when they are closed, looking like pursed lips; as here in a slightly opened form....

....and when fully expanded, and looking like their namesake lilies. This variety is named Purple Dream.

The varied colors and irregular form of the spectacular parrot tulips––this one is Rococo––remind me of the story of Tulip mania that took hold in the Netherlands in the 17th century, when a single bulb may have fetched an enormously high price. The Wikipedia article at the link explains that this may have been something of a myth. Nonetheless, tulips had recently been introduced to Europe from Turkey, and their value as beautiful flowers was clearly understood.

Even as it moves toward the end of its life, the Rococo tulip has a dramatic presence.

This is a truly gorgeous tulip that I haven't grown before, the viridiflora tulip Esperanto. Viridiflora is from the Latin viridis, "fresh green", as the center of the petals have a green flame. In this tulip the green is bordered by white and pinks, and it's such a pleasure to see the variations in color and the changes in shape as the pointed, wavy petals open.

As I was photographing Esperanto, Poppy got into a picture; she was interested in the insects mating on the windowpane outside.

Lastly, a yellow tulip, blooming outdoors in the peony border. Many years ago I planted several Emperor tulips there, and from time to time one or two will bloom. After all the red tulips––for some reason I didn't realize all the tulips I had ordered were in the red family––it is a treat to see a yellow one; it can fit into the red theme because of the very thin red border along its petals. The photographs keep the tulips present; in the garden they have given way to lilacs, which in turn will give way to other flowers during this grand season of spring.