Closer

A 9x12 view of a Naples street, closer to what I am looking for.

Neapolitan Mal Content

12x16 oil of Rua Catalana (the lower street) at Via Medina in Naples.   I am not sure that this picture is what I want yet...It may undergo revision.

Arnheim writes, "The Pointillists displayed the Newtonian revelation that neutral gray comes about as the union of various colors.  Although the effect of a straight gray does not vary all that much from the additive mixture of multicolored dots, it makes all the difference for the meaning of the pictorial statement that the drab tranquillity of standard existence is revealed as an accumulation of all the riches."

Ornate Column and Dumpster in Naples with a Definition of Painting

Another 9x12 drawing of a street scene in Naples.   I also made more progress on the painting I started yesterday.

In the Lucien Freud: paintings exhibition catalog Robert Hughes offers a moving definition of painting:

"Painting is a sublime instrument of dissatisfaction, of dissent from any kind of visual orthodoxy and received idea, not excluding those of late modernist mannerism.  No work of art can ever be experienced at first hand by as many people as a network news broadcast or the commercials that grout it.  That does not matter. It never has.  What does count is the energy and persistence with which painting can embrace not 'empty value' but lived experience of the world; give that experience stable form, measure and structure; and so release it, transformed, into one mind at a time, viewer by viewer, so that it can work as (among other things) a critique of the more 'ideological' and generalized claims of mass media.  There is no great work of art, abstract or figurative (and especially none figurative) without an empirical core, a sense that the mind is working on raw material that exists in the world at large, in some degree beyond mere invention.  Painting is, one might say, exactly what mass visual media is not: a way of specific engagement, not of general seduction.  That is its continuing relevance to us.  Everywhere, and at all times, there is a world to be re-formed by the darting subtlety and persistent slowness of the painter's eye.  We are never loose from our bodies and the re-embodiment of our experience of that world -- its delivery from the merely conceptual, the unfelt, the second-hand or the rhetorically transcendent -- is what painting offers."

Naples 4

I did start a painting, but have another 9x12 drawing for now.  This location is the corner of Via Sanfelice and Via Medina.  I hope I am conveying the sense of non-stop activity that typifies Naples.

Another Naples

Another 9x12 charcoal drawing of a street scene in Naples.

Napoli

Exploring a new urban subject, the city of Naples, Italy, I am starting off with drawings.  There will be other non-urban images as well to come.   Oil and pastel paintings soon.  Both of these are 9x12.

Deli Grocery

Another 18x24 oil of the Bergen and Underhill corner in Brooklyn.

Arnheim writes, "The eager searchers who hope to find the secret of beauty in mathematical proportions expect that the golden section or some other ratio will offer them a recipe for how to design a successful building or painting.  Actually, all that such measurements can do for the artist is to sharpen relations he has selected intuitively.  If he wants to find the middle of a canvas or facade, a yardstick can help; but it is the artist, not the yardstick that indicated the middle as the proper answer to a compositional question.  Le Corbusier's modulor never made a success of anybody who lacked the genius of its inventor."

Back To The Hills

Back to the hills.  12 x 24 oil of the Five Corners site looking south towards Stony Ledge.

Interlude

A Brooklyn interlude. 11x14 oil.   When I walk around Brooklyn,  I always seem to visit this intersection.

Five Corners Study

8x12 pastel.

Rudolf Arnheim writes: "The question is not, Why did Cezanne not use correct perspective? but,  Why should he have?  The tradition of naturalistic representation has made us forget that every pictorial device calls for justification--including the conformation to nature."

Five Corners View

Another in the series.  8x10 pastel.

Early Hopper

12x16 oil.

Hopper Study

I have always wanted to do a series of paintings of the spectacular view of the Hopper and Mt. Greylock from Route 7 near the Five Corners, but have shied away from it because ...  it's a spectacular view of the Hopper and Mt. Greylock from Route 7.   Scenic views don't always make for great paintings.   I could paint something like 7 x 10 feet large in the mode of Bierstadt, but I won't.   Though this view needs a bit more space than provided by the 11x14 oil above.   In any case,  I will attempt the series.  It's a beautiful spot, but also kind of sad, since the apple orchard seems to have been abandoned.

Mountain Edges

This weekend I spent a lot of time wandering at the edges of mountains,  the bottom edges.  This drawing I did while sitting on a beautifully manicured lawn that is the footpath up the hill.  After hearing so much talk about a particularly large bear being sighted everywhere,  I also kept looking over my shoulder, another variation on the theme of "looking back".

North Hero

A view of North Hero, Vermont, on Route 2, just north of North Hero House.  9x12 oil.