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.

Saint-Emilion

Many, many years ago,  while I was walking down Witherspoon Street in Princeton, NJ, passing a wine shop, one of the clerks motioned me in, and said I had to try a sample of a French wine from Saint-Emilion.   He was so excited about the wine because as soon as you tasted it, the wine literally gave you the sensation of expanding in your mouth.  That was the only time I've ever had that experience.  The result is that since then I've always had a fondness for the words "Saint-Emilion" and was fortunate to visit this wine center a while back.  This small painting depicts one of the side streets of Saint-Emilion.  6x8 oil on gessobord.

Long View

Another long view of Saint-Emilion, a 12 x 16 oil on canvas.

Rooftops

A 12x16 oil on canvas of a rooftop view of Saint-Emilion, which is built on hillsides, presumably land that was ill-suited to vineyards; just a guess.  At the entrance to the town, which is flat, vines are planted around the remains of an old church, including what would have been the area within the church.

Up The Hill

The weather may be a factor today in getting another tree drawing, but in the meantime we can look up the hill in Saint-Emilion.  A 12x16 oil on canvas.

The Sky

A steep walk in Saint-Emilion.  Some shutters are closed and some partly open.  The sky.  A 9x12 oil on canvas.

Singing in Saint-Emilion

This time I set up a less typical composition: this 9x12 oil on canvas painting is like a cubist painting with depth.  Down the stony incline, and beyond the buildings to the distant fields, we go.  It's another view of Saint-Emilion, where everything sings on a sunny, blue sky day, even the dark stony walls.

Tight Shutters

Today I opted to keep the painting simple: it's a 9x12 oil on canvas of an alleyway in Saint-Emilion.  I suppose the residents keep the houses cool by using the shutters which fit exactly in the window and door openings.  Or maybe nobody's home.

Saint-Emilion

Since I've been away, I have posted nothing for the last couple weeks.  But...here is a 9x12 oil on canvas of a street view in Saint-Emilion, a medieval town near Bordeaux, which seems to have more wine shops than people.  It's also surrounded by vineyards.