Sunday, June 30, 2013

Bergen and Grand and The Old Way of Seeing


A 9x12 oil version of the earlier posted drawing of the corner of Bergen and Grand in Brooklyn.


Below I have accumulated some quotes from The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic (And How to Get It Back) by Jonathan Hale.  The key quote is halfway down, "The loss of the old way..."   I am also intrigued with "visual listening."

The designers of the past succeeded easily where most today fail because they saw something different when they looked at a building.  They saw a pattern in light and shade.  When they let pattern guide them, they opened their ability to make forms of rich complexity.  The forms they made began to dance.

What we recognize and love is the same kind of pattern we see in every face, the pattern of our own life form.  The same principles apply to buildings that apply to mollusks, birds, or trees.  Architecture is the play of patterns derived from nature and ourselves.

Design is intuitive.  But intuition follows natural laws.  To design intuitively is not to lose control but to guide unconsciously.

A building is not nature and it is not an imitation of nature; it is an expression of our nature.

Something draws us to imperfection—“that hint of ugliness without which nothing works,” as Edgar Degas is supposed to have said.  A ruined building has a wildness about it and, at the same time, an inherent discipline.  An eighteenth-century house that has become rundown can be very alluring in its way.  It keeps its rhythm, its form, but it begins to be a little more like an old tree.  It still has its outlines and it still has the old power, but the civility has been stripped away.

American landscapes often have a kind of scruffy messiness that has its own appeal.  You see it on secondary highways—the billboards, the motels, the truck stops.  We all know those roads; there is something tacky but comfortable about them, something a little tough, a little raw.  Such a landscape violates every principle of design—except, perhaps, one: do something wrong.  I do not refer to the strip.  The strip is its own world; it has a very different character from the occasional garage or billboard or roadhouse.  The strip is urgent and hostile; it no longer says it’s okay to relax, it’s okay to be casual.
One can perceive the city and its streets to be rooms, of which the building are the walls, as Louis Kahn said.

It has been typical of the art of our age that it affronts us.  I think we have become overly accustomed to the idea that if art is to have any value, it should have that quality of murder.  You must kill the routine, kill the expectation.  You must kill the normal.  This point of view assumes there can be no magic in life as it is normally lived.

Before the machine age, no one had to make the choice to be conscious of pattern, to be aesthetic.  Now, to be in visual touch requires taking a deliverate step.  Numbness is today offered all around.  We fall into it easily.  We do have to choose to be awake, as people in the past did not.

The loss of the old way of seeing buildings was the reverse of the transformation Betty Edwards’s students made: it was a closing of access to visual competence, brought about by a shift in paradigm.  The old paradigm for design had been pattern; the new paradigm was use.  When the paradigm changed, seeing itself changed.  Seeing buildings became a different process.  Around 1830, designers of buildings made what seemed to be a small change in paradigm, but the results were not small.  The new design process was like the “left-mode,” or symbolic, drawing of a hand: it was about its subject.  Such a drawing tries to get “handness” onto paper, whereas the “right-mode” drawing derives from the pattern of light and shade on the hand; the pattern an artist sees is not on the hand at all but in the artist’s eye.  The right-mode drawing process explores and plays with the pattern the artist sees.  In intuitive design, one does not think about the object perceived, one does not think about perception.  One just plays with the light and shadows.

Intuitive seeing is to see, and seem almost to be seen by, one’s surroundings.  It is like silent visual listening, an awareness in which the listening goes both ways.  The Nothing in the walls, the windows, the shadows, and the light, listens.  One is master of knowing where one is.

I am walking in the country, thinking about lunch and the bad thing someone said, or the good thing I will do, ramping along, when I stop for a moment…and suddenly it all comes in: yellow tres, fields, shadows—the country is full of shadows.  The sensation is a kind of visual listening.  In this state, perception is more vivid, colors are deeper, the world looks at once more real and more magical.
The woods and meadows often bring out this way of seeing.  But built places may evoke it as well…It can come about in the middle of Grand Central Station, as Tony Hiss describes it The Experience of Place:  “…a change that lets us start to see all the things around us at once and yet also look calmly and steadily at each one of them…. The experience… is of being overtaken by a sense that in the midst of a crowded and confining city you can be present in and a part of a serene and endless world.
But what is this openness…?  It strikes me as something like a region, an enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests.”

After a certain age, a child tends to stop seeing just what is in front of him—the shadows, the colors—and starts instead to see what they signify.  It is o longer a lovely blue and white shape with white speckles on it, it is Rest Area This Way.  But it is a lovely blue, isn’t it?  Must we have one or the other, practical information or intuitive vision?  Must the intuitive experience be childish?  The old way of seeing is a child’s way of seeing.  It is my memory of how I saw when I was five years old.  But it is not childhood I want, it is the visual experience I remember from childhood.

A designer is a master of playing; master, most of all, of listening.  There can be a moment of fear just as you let go, when first you become afraid of the modern silence.  The silence is daunting, if you don’t try to fill it up.  But such a moment passes.  The silence is unreal.  It is the voices—of shadow and light and pattern—that are real.

In the sense of knowing my inborn patterns, I know much more than I have learned.  In listening—visually—I listen with the force of that self-knowledge.

A Bend in the Canal and Visual Listening


Another simple 8x10 pastel of the canal.

Jonathan Hale writes in The Old Way of Seeing: "A designer is a master of playing; master, most of all, of listening.  There can be a moment of fear just as you let go, when first you become afraid of the modern silence.  The silence is daunting, if you don't try to fill it up.  But such a moment passes.  The silence is unreal.  It is the voices--of shadow and light and pattern--that are real.
In the sense of knowing my inborn patterns, I know much more than I have learned.  In listening--visually--I listen with the force of that self-knowledge."

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Simple Canal


An 8x10 pastel of the lush green canal.

Another quote from Jonathan Hale: "After a certain age, a child tends to stop seeing just what is in front of him--the shadows, the colors--and starts instead to see what they signify.  It is no longer a lovely blue-and-white shape with while speckles on it, it is Rest Area This Way.  But it is a lovely blue, isn't it?  Must we have one or the other, practical information or intuitive vision?  Must the intuitive experience be childish?  The old way of seeing is a child's way of seeing.  It is my memory of how I saw when I was five years old.  But it is not childhood I want, it is the visual experience I remember from childhood."

Friday, June 28, 2013

Grand Avenue


An 11x14 charcoal and pastel drawing of a loading dock on Grand Avenue.  Note the similarities to the canal pastel below and the Brooklyn street above.

Jonathan Hale writes in The Old Way of Seeing, " Before the machine age, no one had to make the choice to be conscious of pattern, to be aesthetic.  Now, to be in visual touch requires taking a deliberate step.  Numbness is today offered all around.  We fall into it easily.  We do have to choose to be awake, as people in the past did not."

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Good Canal without Thinking



The canal was good to me today.

I am rereading Jonathan Hale's book, The Old Way of Seeing.  He quotes James Agee who writes "Goethe wrote that it is good to think, better to look and think, best to look without thinking."

Monday, June 24, 2013

Brooklyn Street Drawing


An 11x14 charcoal and pastel drawing of a street in Brooklyn, late afternoon or early evening, whatever one would call sixish.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Bergen and Grand


A different view of the corner at Bergen and Grand: a 9x12 charcoal and pastel drawing.  When I don't have much time, I draw.

Thursday, June 20, 2013


An 18x24 oil of the corner at Bergen and Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn.  I did a drawing of this scene recently, and thought it might work.  There are actually two corners (or six corners!).

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

D&R Canal Near Trimmer


Another 8x10 pastel in the try-to-keep-it simple series.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Castle Point Carriageway


An 8x10 pastel of some point on the Castle Point Carriageway in Minnewaska State Park near New Paltz, N.Y.  I'd like to do a series of simple, colorful, small landscape pastels.  Let's see what happens.  The carriageway goes to the left.  To the right is a cliff.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Ferry Street


A 9x12 oil on mdf panel looking down Ferry Street in Lambertville, NJ.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Another Bond and First with the First Encounter with Elstir


A 12x9 charcoal and pastel drawing of the corner of Bond and First in Brooklyn.

I have finally reached the encounter between Marcel and the famous painter Elstir.  Here's what Marcel writes about Elstir:

"Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost  all seascapes done here, at Balbec.  But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew.  The names which denote things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with itself."

In a November 2, 2008 article in the N.Y. Times, Randy Kennedy wrote:

"Proust's character Elstir, a Zen-like Impressionist thought to be made up of pieces of Whistler, Monet, Gustave Moreau, Edouard Vuillard and others, is important not only in terms of plot...but in terms of ideas.
Elstir can come off at times as Proust's caricature of the beret-draped Romantic, rushing to the beach at night, naked model in tow, to capture a certain quality of moonlight.  But Elstir's artistic ideal, to perceive things innocently--or as Becket describes it, to represent 'what he sees, and not what he knows he ought to see'--is profound.  And it goes to the heart of one of Proust's main themes: that we are held prisoner by preconceptions, by habit and by the normal machinery of memory, which provides only a pale, distorted record of experiences."

Betty Edwards, in her Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, has admirably exploited this "profound" ideal.





Saturday, June 15, 2013

Lambertville Street


An 11x14 charcoal and pastel drawing of a street in Lambertville, NJ.  I am also working on a painting of this one.  I like its combination of flatness and depth.


Friday, June 14, 2013

Fifth and Bergen


An 11x14 drawing in charcoal and pastel.  I am working on a larger painting.

One has to stay focused and humble.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Lambertville Drawing


A 9x12 charcoal and pastel drawing of South Union Street in Lambertville, NJ.

Every now and then I have to remind myself why I am doing all this.  Sometimes I forget.  I will elaborate later.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

2nd Near Fifth


This 11x14 oil I did a couple weeks ago.  One could call it another variation upon "X".

I haven't been reading any straight "art" books lately.  I keep plugging away at Proust.  I am "Within a Budding Grove" anticipating the painter Elstir.  I have been reading Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life by Evan Hughes, a great book, but no painters.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Two Pastels




If all mornings could only be like this one: two 8x10 pastels of the canal.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Sidewalk Corner


An 18x24 oil version of the corner of Nevins and President in Brooklyn.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Painting



For the last couple days I have been painting, some on canvas, but most on interior walls.  However, I did get out today and do two drawings.  Of course, I don't know what day it is, so dated the tree trunk drawing with yesterday's date.  I'm now trying a range of graphite pencils to reduce the amount of stuff I have to carry when I go out to draw.