Grey Outside the Window

Sometimes I just like grey.  The trees in winter all blend into each other forming a mass of grey.  This is a view looking out of the window from the empty studio. 12 x 9 inches.  Pencil on paper.

Renoir told his son Jean that at twenty he "was already aware that a few pencil strokes are worth more than any number of theories..."  This was the explanation he offered to justify why he didn't follow up an invitation to meet again with the landscape painter Diaz in Paris. "We would have exchanged ideas and discussed theories."  His first encounter with Diaz happened when Renoir had started to paint out-of-doors in the Fontainebleau Forest.  Diaz appeared just in time to save him from being beat up by a group of punks.  In this context Renoir's excuse for avoiding Diaz is weak, but his words about pencil strokes are still true.  Pencil strokes can be a way of searching without theorizing.

Emptying The Studio

Years ago I setup a studio in a second floor bedroom, which seemed like a good idea at the time.  I covered the carpet with drop cloths to keep it clean, but now we are replacing all the carpet because it's old and has noticeable wear and tear elsewhere on the same floor.  So I've been taking apart the bedroom studio (as well as the other rooms) for the new carpet installation.  This painful and traumatic emptying naturally leads me to wonder if it's time to re-think not just the studio layout, but everything about what happens there.  Imagine finding a subject that one could keep painting and re-inventing, one painting leading to the next painting.  This happened to Philip Guston when he started doing his crazy cartoonish paintings.  Jean Renoir writes about his father: "He told me one day that he regretted not having painted the same picture--he meant the same subject--all his life.  In that way, he would have been able to devote himself entirely to what constituted 'creation' in painting: the relations between form and color."  Giorgio Morandi is an example of doing this.  In any case, I'm just thinking, but not too hard.

The accompanying painting is not the bedroom studio, but another studio space that I share with two other artists.   I painted it four years ago in January.  16 x 20 oil on panel.

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."