Matera, Abstraction, and How Long Does It Take

In the book "Art Students League Of New York On Painting," painter Mary Beth McKenzie offers a couple of interesting quotes.  Concerning how long it takes to learn how to paint, she quotes painter Robert Philipp, who "often said, 'The first fifty years are the hardest.'"  I can only wholeheartedly agree.

She also writes "Every good representational painting has to be a good abstract painting."  I've often said myself to anybody who would listen that all painting is abstract.

The accompanying painting is another view of Matera, Italy.  11x14 oil on panel.

Town of Stone

Matera, Italy, called the town of stone.  11x14 Oil on panel.

Matera

A view of Matera, a town in the south of Italy. 11x14 oil on panel.

City Nature

A city is more human nature than mother nature.  But cities can be cold and alien just like nature.  Still there's something very appealing about them, just like nature.  Here's an evening view of Montparnasse in Paris, where the trees and the buildings seem to live together.  I started this painting three and a half years ago and decided to push it further in the last week, since I've noticed that most of my recent paintings have been about older European towns and cities.  14x18 oil on canvas.

Joyeux Noel!

Harmony

St. Emilion, 11x14 oil on canvas.

I've been examining a recent book titled "Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism."  In the main essay, Barry Schwabsky writes about man's relation to nature today and how it can affect current landscape painting.  He states that we no longer think that man is outside nature, the attitude that has brought us to where we are today, a planet on the brink.  Nor can we accept the other end of the continuum, that man is just a bunch of chemicals reacting blindly within nature.  He cites the example of Jackson Pollack engaged in painting, a "pure harmony, an easy give-and-take" dance which taps into and exposes something "quickened by a spirit" beyond painting, as a guide to how landscape painting may offer the opportunity to "reset" the relationship between man and nature.  Ironically, the example of Pollack demonstrates how precarious man's search for harmony can be.

Yesterday I finished reading Jean Renoir's biography of his father.  He quotes from some papers left by his father in which Renoir father wrote: "I believe that I am closer to God when I am humbly in front of the splendor of nature, accepting the role which I have been given to play, honoring this majestic splendor without self-interest and certainly without demands, persuaded that the Creator has forgotten nothing" [my translation].  It seems to me that Renoir, though writing at an earlier time, says about the same thing, but in less fashionable language.

Though landscape painting keeps re-inventing itself, the problem of man and nature and its reflection in landscape painting is not new.  Except today the urgency is much greater for re-establishing a harmonious relationship between man and nature because our survival depends upon it.  I think artists have always been aware of the man/nature conundrum.  Landscape painting, one way or another, has always expressed the latent desire to return to a Garden of Eden, the idyllic time and place before time, when man was in harmony with nature.  This is the archetypal myth which seems to underlie all poetry and painting, and keeps re-appearing in one form or another.

Schwabsky sees landscape painting as a means to pursue this harmony between man and nature, or make us more conscious of the need for it.  He writes "...it has become more and more common for painters to use landscape--the image of nature, displayed in all its artifice--as, in essence, a metaphor for painting itself, because they intuit that painting in turn can be a metaphor for our relation to nature."

A Concentration Related to St. Emilion

Another view of St. Emilion, 11x14 oil on canvas.

In a thoughtful New Yorker article called "The Art of Dying," art critic Peter Schjeldahl, contemplating his own death, writes that "snobbery [is] a necessary stage for the insecure until we acquire taste that admits and reflects the variety of experience.  To limber your sensibility, stalk the aesthetic everywhere: cracks in a sidewalk, people's ways of walking.  The aesthetic isn't bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption.  If you can't put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly."

Because of this open attitude to the world, he can write the words that follow:

"I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present.  We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are."

St. Emilion

St. Emilion.  Funny how cubism was invented in France.  12x16 oil on canvas.

It Was All Gold

Late in the day yesterday I went walking up the road into the hay field.  The sun was just on the edge of the mountains behind me when I sketched this row of hay bales.  The front circle of hay was lit up like a cigarette end.   On the way up the field I met a person coming down who was walking his dog.  He had a camera around his neck.  I asked if he took any good pictures.  He said that it was "all gold."  9x12, pencil on paper.

Old World Urban Geometry

You can easily tell you aren't in Brooklyn.  It's a different kind of urban geometry in the old world.  What you see here is Rue Rossetti approaching Place Rossetti in Nice old town where the cathedral is located.  It's a cubist space with overlapping verticals, light coming from different sources, and surprising shadow shapes.  9x12 oil on panel.

So Much Geometry

Urban subjects are appealing to paint, whether it's Brooklyn or Nice,  because there's so much variety, color, and contrast. Not to mention the geometry.  Oops!  I said it.  This is a view of Atlantic Avenue near Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn.  9x12 oil on panel.

Posing With A Smart Phone

A quick oil sketch of the model from the last figure painting/drawing session, proving once and for all, that one can look at a smart phone even without clothes.  16x12 oil on panel.

Flying, Jumping and Bouncing in Nice

A view in Nice old town where I painted on site earlier this year.  This painting depicts the intersection of Rue de la Croix with Rue de la Loge which becomes Rue Saint-Joseph.  The streets are narrow, and when a car or small truck comes flying up, one has to jump out of the way.  The sunlight bounces off everything.  9x12 oil on panel.

Slowly Emerging

I continue to work on this slowly emerging view of Nice old town from Chateau Hill.  9x12 oil on panel.

A Paradox

Distant views intrigue me because one can see a lot, and at the same time see very little.  This paradox gets amplified in painted distant views.  One sees a lot but it's all paint.  I especially like the distant views from Chateau Hill in Nice.  I'm reminded of Cezanne's paintings of l'Estaque.  9x12 oil on panel.

One More Nice Painting

One more Nice painting, another view from the top of the steps at the end of Rue Rossetti, this time including the building at the top. It contains a niche with a statue of the Madonna and Child.  When I was painting there,  I learned that the stairs are used by many visitors to reach the Chateau Hill.  People would ask me for directions in hesitant French.  I replied in more hesitant French, unless I heard English on the way up.  12x16 oil on panel.

Up In Nice

In Nice, at the end of Rue Rossetti, in old town, there are steps with a name, Escalier Jules Eynaudi, that have several large landings from which one can paint.  This is a view from the top landing.  I painted there several times earlier this year.  The steps lead to a walled pedestrian street, Montee du Chateau, which takes you up higher.  12x16 oil on panel.

An Oddball in Nice

A view down the short Rue Sainte-Claire in Nice old town.   The paintings on my easel are changing fast.  This studio painting depicts a view I painted a couple times on site last March.  There was a torn and indecipherable banner hanging high across the narrow street.  At this corner I encountered a man who would stop every few feet, cross himself and pray.  Everybody ignored him.  I saw him again later acting normally, and he nodded to me in recognition.  I may have seemed like the oddball to him with my easel, painting in a corner against the convent wall.  12x16 oil on panel.