Underhill and Bergen

This 9x12 drawing demonstrates to me at least that a 'plain' street corner has a lot going on, that we usually walk past and even over. This will make a challenging painting. I am trying to complete the life of Matisse. Who has time for painting?

Park Side

This is a Brooklyn view from a fourth floor window looking upon the edge of a park. It's a 17x17 1/2 oil.

Swamp at Field Farm

A short break from Brooklyn. 8x10 pastel.

Dean and Grand Again

This is a view of Dean and Grand looking in the opposite direction. Both 9x12. The oil is on a mdf panel.

Early in his career Matisse started wearing a suit and tie to confound his critics and public who expected to meet a wild man. He seems to have painted in a suit and tie as well. There's a famous 1918 self-portrait in which he is fully dressed for the office, except he is painting. He must have been a deliberate and careful painter, despite all the painting and re-painting he supposedly did. If I wore a suit and tie when painting, I would have paint on it within seconds.

According to Spurling, Matisse was also celebrated as the painter who best represented the philosophy of Henri Bergson in terms of dealing with reality and emotion. Matisse was suspicious of this claim because Bergson preferred dull, academic paintings. There's the thought and there's the reality that don't often coincide. Just like painting.

Dean and Grand

An 11x14 charcoal drawing and an 11x14 oil of the same Brooklyn corner. I could call this Brooklyn cubism.

Tree with Sign

All I have is this morning's Walk-n-Draw. The sign on the tree does not say "Tree." It only says "No Parking."

John Jacobus in his Matisse book writes, "Very few twentieth-century painters have joined Matisse in perpetuation of the vision of a terrestrial paradise populated by gods in human guise, or humans in godlike attitudes. In projecting his imaginary studio and in working out the actual decorative canvases of Dance and Music for Shchukin, the artist had achieved a significant fusion of two elements in his work. He had found that the visions of a mythological harmony that he had expressed again and again in his large figure compositions of 1905-1910 could be expressively (and not just anecdotally) incorporated in his studio concept, a theme that reached back to his dark pictures dating from before 1900. Stretching a point, it might be contended that the whole of his subsequent work is predicated upon this illuminating insight."

This explains all those odalisques. The studio was the paradise where all his anxiety could find some resolution.

Washington Avenue

A 12 x 24 oil of a Brooklyn scene.

I read somewhere that Andrew Wyeth was outside once doing a watercolor. A couple people wandered over to peek. Wyeth overheard one tell the other that the painter was an amateur who didn't know anything about art. In the first volume of the Matisse biography, Spurling recounts that Matisse once met Madame Cezanne after her husband had died. She told Matisse that her husband had been an old fool who did not know anything about art.

Brooklyn Street Opening

This is an 11x14 pastel.

In case you are wondering why so much Brooklyn. My grandson, who was born almost a month ago, lives in Brooklyn. I expect to make many trips to Brooklyn, which is fortunate since I have wanted to do urban pictures for a while, and Brooklyn is an amazing place.

Matisse: Matisse invented modern painting. Here's an excerpt from the Matisse book by Lawrence Gowing, writing about the great period from 1910 to 1918 or so and the painting The Blue Window : "The supremacy that colour attained in these pictures was quite new and unparalleled. Colour was no longer put to any descriptive or expressive purpose. It was simply itself, the homogeneous primal substance. The development culminated in an inspired invention. Can anyone forget when he first became aware of La fenetre bleue? In a moment one knew one of the simplest and most radiant ideas in the whole of art, the idea that the shapes of things are immaterial except as fantastic vessels -- a dish, a vase, a pot like a chalice, a tree like a bunch of balloons--to contain the airy brightness of the world."

This comment stuck out at me because this very painting I did contemplate many a time years ago.

Here's another comment from John Elderfield from the 1992 retrospective catalog: "Throughout his work, that which separates and connects does not receive light but gives light. His paintings are not windows onto an external nature. They are not windows through which light passes, but mirrors that return light, and with a transformed nature. Matisse thought of his paintings as emitting a beneficent radiation."

We may take Matisse for granted these days, but in his day, when he was first creating the magnificent paintings of the 1910-18 period, he was much maligned. Spurling writes that for years he suffered from intense anxiety attacks and insomnia. We read about a lot of artists who didn't make it because of the physical/emotional/spiritual difficulties they encountered, and Spurling indicates that Matisse, no matter what one may think of some of his art, was a stubborn survivor.

Brooklyn Corner

An 11x14 oil on another Brooklyn corner.

I'm reading John Elderfield's catalog for the 1992 MOMA Matisse restrospective. He has fascinating ideas about what Matisse was after. I need to digest them better. It seems that Matisse wanted to paint a mental reality, and saw copying nature as a straightjacket. I like most of Matisse's paintings, and want to take what is useful and avoid dogma.

A Garage in Brooklyn

A 9x12 pastel of a garage in Brooklyn.

I finished the first volume of the Matisse biography. I have always loved the great masterpieces like Red Studio and The Piano Lesson in MOMA, but now think there's much more I need to learn about Matisse, and quickly, especially about the paintings that are not easy to like. I will start the second volume of the biography shortly. In the meantime I am borrowing a pile of Matisse books from local libraries.

Park Place and Prospect, and more Matisse

Though fighting a nasty cold, I had a productive weekend with images of Brooklyn.

Now I am three quarters of the way through the first volume of the Matisse biography. Matisse learned about the Impressionists, Van Gogh and Cezanne from John Peter Russell and Camille Pissarro; he learned some more from Signac but Matisse didn't stay long in the Pointillist camp. There's a comment about the painter Maximilean Luce using "a sieve to speed up the process of covering his canvas evenly with coloured dots." Though he could not afford it, Matisse purchased a small Cezanne Bathers painting, which became his source of inspiration and hope. I found one tiny error in the book: the author refers to Cezanne as "in his seventies" when he was hounded by newspaper reports of being "diseased" because of his painting. Alas, Cezanne died at the age of 67, prematurely aged from diabetes.

Matisse spent the roughly 15 years from 1891 through 1905 in poverty, maligned by his family and other artists, always in need of money, suffering from anxiety and insomnia; and always unsure of himself. Maybe his sense of humor was a deciding factor. Also his wife, Amelie. Without her, he probably would not have survived. At one point, when he thought he might be selling out, he scrubbed clean a bunch of canvases for re-use (he couldn't afford to just throw them away). Of course, I suspect he destroyed some nice paintings.

What still confuses me are the 1905-06 paintings, such as Woman in a Hat, The Open Window, Collioure, and Interior with a Young Girl (Girl Reading). They are difficult paintings, even today, not very sensuous in terms of paint application. Painting is an acquired taste like drinking beer. Matisse had guts and was willing to risk everything.

Sterling at Washington and Matisse

An 8x10 pastel of a street corner in Brooklyn, not too far from the museum.

I have been reading The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling. Here are some things I did not know about the early Matisse. He was quite a prankster as a teenager, often using a peashooter to annoy people. He had no idea what he wanted to do except that it wasn't to follow in his father's footsteps as a store owner and seed merchant. At the age of twenty he was bitten by a bug that demanded that he become a painter. Somehow in 1891 he managed to get to Paris with a small allowance from his father. He lived in extreme poverty in the most run down areas of Paris with other artists for several years. The most famous painter of the day, William Bouguereau, told him he had no future as an artist. Even though the Impressionists were all around, he painted very conservatively. Actually his early work is quite fabulous. Since he started late as an artist, he worked constantly because he felt he had to learn everything at once.

Here's one amusing anecdote that gives an insight into Matisse's character: He entered the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in 1892. The school had "dark, drafty classrooms...infested with rats that stole the bread-balls meant for picking out highlights on the...charcoal drawings." Matisse was older than most of the other art students. He "made a stir in his first class by refusing to remove his hat for the master: 'I'll take off my hat when there are no more drafts.' He was promptly suspended for two weeks for insolence."

Le Pont d'Avignon

9x12 pastel of a portion of the bridge over the Rhone River at Avignon at early morning. This is not a traditional view. More like an abstract anvil.

Rooftop

It's not Brooklyn this time. A view of Cannes from an earlier visit. 9x12 pastel.

Seventh at Fourth

It's not like I haven't been doing anything. I'm just slow this week. The above is an 11x14 oil.

I started to read The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling. I am not far into it yet, but two things strike me: Matisse came from an very provincial background for someone who ended up as a great Modernist, and by the time he found some recognition, he was already in his late forties. But that's good. Great artists have to come from somewhere, and it may take time. Actually it always takes time.