Studio Oil

A view of the studio with my messy table in the foreground.  This is a 16x20 oil on panel.   Through the recent email update from the painter Randall David Tipton, I learned of the British painter Fred Cuming,  who has done some wonderful studio interiors over the years.  I've previously mentioned the studio interiors of Ken Howard, and I know that Fairfield Porter painted a number of them  There's a long tradition of painting studio interiors.

Marais Park, Bonnard and Fairfield Porter

It may take me a couple days to get back on track. Here is another pencil drawing from the sketchbook. At Giverny, I saw a large Bonnard exhibition which had many landscapes and drawings, which one does not usually see. I learned that Bonnard routinely did preliminary drawings for his paintings.

Another fascinating thing I saw firsthand: Fairfield Porter said that he learned his ultimate direction in painting from seeing late Vallotton and Vuillard paintings in Paris. At the Musee D'Orsay, I saw some paintings that validate that statement. I mention this only because I have not seen these paintings before, and was amazed at how directly Porter evolved out of Vallotton and Vuillard, something that no one seems to have expanded upon. I think there's a future exhibition there for some curator.

Another High Corn Field

On Friday, it rained. I spent part of day looking in a mirror. I am too old to be like the young Rembrandt though I seem to have imitated one of his head poses. And the corn fields keep my fascination.

I just finished reading Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art by Justin Spring. He recognizes on the last page that his book doesn't do justice to the complexity of Porter in terms of his writings and paintings. The book does establish that Anne Porter, wife to Fairfield Porter, was a saint for all that she had to put up with. My google search indicates that she was 95 in 2006 when she published her book Living Things: Collected Poems. Fairfield Porter died in 1975.

A couple of amusing quotes from the book:

"...Porter quoted his favorite story about Mallarme, related by Paul Valery to Stravinsky, who had included it in his autobiography:"Degas, who, as is well known, liked to dabble in poetry, one day said to Mallarme: 'I cannot manage the end of my sonnet, and it is not that I am wanting in ideas.' Mallarme, softly: 'It is not with ideas that one makes sonnets, but with words.'"

Porter spent his last summer painting with watercolors. He wrote that watercolor "is roughly to oil what the harpsichord is to the piano. Except I like the harpsichord better than watercolor, and oil better than the piano."

Bright Morning Canal and Everything

This particular tree keeps attracting me. The pastel is done over acrylic wash. Multi-media.

In the same interview cited earlier Fairfield Porter said, "I think [painting is]...a way of making the connection between yourself and everything. You connect yourself to everything that includes yourself by the process of painting."

The Revelation of the Obvious

In the charcoal drawing, I familiarized myself with the view. The top image is pastel over acrylic washes.

I have been reading about Fairfield Porter, a painter I have always liked, especially his landscapes. In an interview he once used the phrase "the revelation of the obvious." He painted what was around him, where he happened to be and live. The phrase "the revelation of the obvious" suggests that because it's obvious we may miss the revelation.