Assyrian Feet

The guard at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth college must have thought I was a little crazy: there I was, down on my knees, photographing the very bottom of the large Assyrian reliefs in their collection, scuttling along, still on my knees, from one piece to another. I'm sure I looked pretty silly, but when I suddenly see something that touches me, who cares? These are details of a group of reliefs from the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, Iraq, 883-559 BCE and are made of gypsum (you can see a complete one here.)

I became aware of how our feet touch the earth, the feel of gravity as the gracefully drawn sandaled feet  moved downward from heel to toe. Each line subtly expresses an illusion of swelling form, simply and with clarity. Look at the different shapes of the toenails, as though they are portraits of specific individuals. The traces of original paint remind me that the reliefs had been brightly colored.

I loved the relationship of the organic form of toes to the flowing patterns of decorative clothing.

The feet seemed the most personal, most vulnerable, and least stylized part of the sculpture. The hands looked like undifferentiated cylinders, the faces were in the Assyrian style, the musculature vigorous and decorative, but the feet! they were very sensitively modeled, and so achingly human.

A New Painting: "Fins"

Fins, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 6 5/8 x 7 1/2 in.

This is one of my rare images that doesn't have its origin in a farm machine. Instead, it was an abandoned object that I photographed while at a granite quarry near Barre, Vermont, which you can see in this blog post. It is also one of my more complex and volumetric images, as rectangular forms topped by a triangle protrude from a large cylinder. When I first started working with this image, I had a wider view showing more of the fins (if that's what they're called); I decided to simplify the composition by cropping it closer. The original photographic image was also closer to an umber, but I must have been influenced by my previous paintings of red bars which you can see here, and ended with the image having a red character. As of now, I'm quite satisfied with it. 

detail, Fins

Charles and Ray Eames: Spinning Tops

An array of antique tops on a tabletop greets us at the opening of a short, seven minute, film, buoyant with life and color, with a charming score by Elmer Bernstein. The surprise for me is that it was made by Charles and Ray Eames in 1969. I did not know that the Eames made films, thinking of them as the great designers....

...of innovative furniture, such as these chairs. It wasn't until I watched the fascinating PBS documentary, Eames: The Architect and the Painter, that I learned how involved they were in designing exhibitions and in film, including a multi screen project for the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair. 

What most caught my attention in the documentary were snippets from a small film about a small toy, Tops, which you can see in its entirety here on Youtube. They made another sweet film about old toy trains, Toccata for Toy Trains (1957), which you can see here. The tops, of all different shapes and colors, spin merrily along. 

They are part of cultures around the world, a toy that seems to be part of a universal language.

We are shown many different ways of winding string around tops....

and different mechanisms for spinning them.

Then there are the games that are played with tops.

And childhood memories of the surprise in the box of Cracker Jacks. Tops color-and-shape-shift as they twirl, acting magically to stay aloft on their fine points. If we're lucky we can get them to spin for a long time, even hop across surfaces, until they wind down and finally collapse. They are such a simple toy that they will keep going and going, again and again. 

It may be that I loved this short film because of the two tops in my collection of old things. I've never tried to play with them, but I admire their swelling shapes and their worn colors. All the tops are beautiful little sculptures, kinetic or still.

Daffodil Delirium

Daffodils are an essence of spring. They are the most pleasant plants in the garden, coming up and spreading early cheer each year without demanding any attention from the gardener. And deer won't eat them! The first daffs to appear are the February Gold above, though of course here in Vermont they don't bloom until April.

This densely filled double, touched with green, is a volunteer that's popped up here and there in my garden; I've been told it's an old fashioned variety.

Daffodils come in colors other than yellow, such as this with an apricot cup and white petals.

And the cups are large and small, long and short, and variously ruffled. The petals are rounded and pointed, wide and narrow. 

Some flowers, like this blowsy double, are deliciously scented.

This beauty, called Thalia, is pure white with the tiniest blush of greenish yellow at the throat.

A late arrival, coming at the same time as the narcissus, is this tiny delicate flower named Hawera, several blooms to a stem, nodding their pale yellow heads in graceful profusion. It's tempting to keep adding more and more daffodils to the landscape, but I've decided to stop; it is splendid long running show without any new characters needed.

Two Nice Things

I thought I'd share with you, my readers, a couple of nice things that have happened for me recently. The Arts Council of my adopted state of Vermont has chosen to honor me with an award for "Outstanding Achievement in the Arts"; (click on the image to enlarge it for easier reading). I feel pretty humble and undeserving, and also very touched. My friend, the poet and playwright  David Budbill, will introduce me at the meeting; in the brief remarks I assume I'll have to make I will thank the dairy farmers of Vermont for being so welcoming to me over the years, allowing me to traipse around their farms, painting and taking photos. What would I paint without all that terrific agricultural equipment in my neighborhood?

Last week, the online art magazine Hyperallergic published an interview with me by the artist Rob Colvin (thanks, Rob!) which you can read here.  Long time readers of this blog might not find too much new there, but it is a summing up of my thinking, where I try to connect all my various projects. I hope you like it. 

New Hooked Wool Drawings

 2012 #8, hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen, 13 1/2 x 13 in.

Here are four new drawings that I've just completed. I usually work on several of these pieces at once because the actual painting and hooking don't take that long, but there is a good deal of preparation––working up the drawings and transferring them, figuring out the size of the linen, cutting and ironing it––and then finishing––deciding on the final dimensions, applying matte acrylic medium to the edges and then cutting them––that it makes sense to have a small assembly line. The first piece I'm showing above, #8, is unusual in this body of work in that it has an illusionistic form, something I haven't done before, but might try again as long as I keep it simple.

2012 #9, hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen, 13 1/4 x 15 5/8 in.

Some elements escape, and some are held inside the rectangle.

2012 #10, hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen, 15 3/8 x 12 1/8 in.

A hinge, an angle (a comic mouth?).

2012 #11, hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen, 14 5/8 x 13 1/8 in.

When I first did the sketch for #11 I had only the tilted rectangle with the rounded form on top of it, then I thought to add the intersecting lines which add a subtle illusion. I chose to use a patterned wool for the green form, which adds more texture. I continue to have fun with these drawings, and continue to be surprised that I don't run out of ideas; I'm saying this as an artist who has worked from a motif found in the real world for almost her entire painting life.

The Early Vegetable Garden

I love the early spring garden, when there are only a few plants and the ground is clear and brown, a dark rectangle within the grassy green; the geometry is clear, before profuse vegetable growth obscures it.

I've been planting this week: potatoes, early beets and carrots, various greens.

The peas, planted back in March, have begun to show their delicate tendrils, which will help them rise and cling to the fence as they grow.

The spinach is still small and young, but soon I'll be having thinnings for salads...

along with lettuce and arugula, protected in a cold frame from the recent chilly weather.

A row of young garlic waves its strappy leaves from a covering of hay.

And here hay covers some newly planted carrot seeds, to keep them moist during their long germination. There is the golden hay, and some rows of green, and scatterings of green weeds, but mainly it is the earth that is showing. This is a time of promise; a time to dream of bumper crops, weedless and insect free, before the complex reality of the growing season emerges.

Representation vs Abstraction?

 Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956; oil and paper collage on canvas, 80 x 100 in.

How much tension is there between representational painting and painting that is abstract? or I should say non-objective, in that all two dimensional representations require a summarizing, a thoughtful abstracting of three dimensional reality. I was thinking about this issue last week after writing this blog post on a new textile, whose shapes reminded me of those in one of Philip Guston's figurative works. It sent me back to a wonderful essay by the poet Randall Jarrell called "Against Abstract Expressionism", recommended by the artist Lori Ellison. He wrote it in 1957 as a devil's advocate, arguing against this "canonization of a new saint". I do love many of the paintings of this explosive period; the vigorous brush and robust space of a Franz Kline are thrilling.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavendar Mist); oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas, 

7 ft 3 in x 9 ft 10 in. 

The skeins of paint in a Pollock envelop a mystery, a many-layered search for being. Jarrell, in his devil's advocate role, is eloquent about the actual world and how it is realized in paint: 

Between the object and its representation there is an immense distance: within this distance much of painting lives. 

He writes passionately about the hands in a painting by Georges de la Tour:

As one looks at what has been put into––withheld from––the hands, one is conscious of a mixture of emotion and empathy and contemplation; one is moved, and is unmoved, and is something else one has no name for, that transcends either affect or affectlessness....These parallel cylinders of La Tour's––these hands at once oil-and-canvas and flesh-and-blood; at once dynamic processes in the virtual space of the painting, and the spiritual gestures in the "very world" in which men are martyred, are mourned, and paint the mourning and the martyrdom––these parallel cylinders are only, in an abstract expressionist painting, four parallel cylinders: they are what they are.

But even if "they are what they are" in a non-objective painting, no one is able to purge all association from them; colors and shapes tug at us too.

Jackson Pollock, She-wolf, 1943; oil, gouache, and plaster on canvas, 41 7/8 x 67 in. 

Jarrell ended with this:

Man and the world are all that they ever were––their attractions are, in the end, irresistible; the painter will not hold out against them long. 

Many painters have held out; they continue to find great depth in minimal expression, but what is so interesting is that many of the abstract expressionist artists started out painting images, as did Pollock, and he was going back to the image at the end of his life. Philip Guston had a similar trajectory, from representation to abstraction and back to representation.

Milton Resnick, Untitled, 1983; oil on canvas, 60 x 80 in.

Milton Resnick was known for his densely worked canvases, brushed all over into a rich surface. I still remember stepping off an elevator years ago to be enveloped by the delicious scent of oil coming from his paintings in a gallery down the hall. 

Milton Resnick, Untitled, 1990; acrylic on paper, 28 x 18 in. 

Resnick also surprised everyone by painting small figure compositions towards the end of his life. He too found the world "irresistible". 

Fairfield Porter, Portrait of John Myers, 1953; oil on canvas, 42 7/8 x 38 11/16 in.

There were artists at this time who resolutely refused to join the abstract bandwagon. One was Fairfield Porter, who was also an articulate and widely read critic. He claimed that because Clement Greenberg said that no one could paint figuratively he was determined to do so. He said

I like in art when the artist doesn't know what he knows in general; he only knows what he knows specifically.

Porter was an important role model for a younger generation of representational painters who felt embattled by the dominance of abstraction. How things have changed! 

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle, 1915; oil on canvas, 22 1/2 x 28 1/8 in. 

How is it that I can still feel, contra Jarrell, so much heartfelt passion and pleasure in viewing a painting of a triangle and a rectangle? 

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blue, Yellow and Red, 1927, oil on canvas.

And how is it that this Mondrian takes me into a place of pure spirit? I wrote about my love of geometric abstraction in a blog post "Toward the Essential". 

Fra Angelico, The Virgin Annunciate, ca. late 1420s; tempera and gold on panel; 12 3/8 x 10 inches.

But I also want to weep at the beauty and tenderness of a Fra Angelico Virgin. So in my answer to my initial question, I don't see a conflict at all; instead I see a long and rich relationship in which artists take a little from here and a little from there, with their work existing on a long continuum from objective realism to the determinedly non-objective. If we think of a giant of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso, he himself wandered up and down that path, not touching either end. It is a beautiful path, full of inspiring, moving, and exhilarating painting.  

Reflected Light

The illumination of bright sun reveals worlds and lightens our spirits, but its indirect reflection onto surfaces and objects offers a different way of seeing. Light bounced up onto a Morpho butterfly's wing is reflected back in a remarkable iridescent glow. 

Even a slab of stucco wall can be made beautiful by reflected light; the central rectangle has a lovely yellow warmth within its shade. 

There are sometimes fleeting moments of light reflected from shiny surfaces: here, the sun glancing off the windshield of my car made its way into my bedroom, lighting a patch of ceiling and a pull toy on a shelf.

Sunlight shining on a floor makes its way up the wall and catches the undersides of forms, lighting the ordinary in an extraordinary glow.

A copper pot seems made to pick up moments of light, 

as does a plastic translucent tube, reflecting its red essence on a floor. "Elucidate": shed light on. There are many ways to do that, both figuratively and actually.