Trains, Monet, and Understanding a Poem

There's a precedent for putting a train on a bridge in a painting.  Monet at Argenteuil did several paintings with the train on a bridge.  In this painting it is the Franklin Avenue Shuttle crossing Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a 12x16 oil on panel.

I came across an interesting quote in Helen Vendler's  book, The Odes of John Keats:

"I know no greater help to understanding a poem than writing it out in longhand with the illusion that one is composing it--deciding on this word rather than another, this arrangement of its masses rather than another, this prolonging, this digression, this cluster of senses, this closure."

That is the attitude that I have when drawing or painting, trying to understand what I am looking at, and creating an illusion that I am composing with sensibility what it is that is there.

Still Practicing

Though I usually paint landscapes, I like the opportunity to paint from the figure.  This is a 16x12 oil on panel done earlier this week.

The poet John Keats wrote in a letter dated October 9, 1818: "That which is creative must create itself."  What I think he meant is that one can only learn by doing.  To get better at painting, one has to paint a lot.  Ken Howard quotes the painter Carel Weight: "Painting is rather like playing the piano, you've got to practice every day."

Picking About The Gravel

A painting for the trees and snow series, an 8x10 oil on panel.

From my reading on John Keats, I've found that better words for "negative capability" might be "sympathetic intuition" or "sympathetic imagination."  Walter Jackson Bate wrote in his book called Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats the following:

"The Imagination ... looks inward, grasping by an effort of sympathy and intuition the hidden intention and reality of life; and what it seizes, synthesizes, and creates 'must be truth -- whether it existed before or not.'"

This leads him to say: "For the poet is the object, endowed with a means of expressing itself" and "... the poet is the object, and the force at work within the object is also at work within him."

As an example, Bate writes about the poet, and quotes Keats:  "if a sparrow comes before his window... 'take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.'"

Is it too presumptuous for the painter to say "I am the trees and snow"?  How closely do you identify with what you paint?

Hidden Hopper

In this painting the trees in the foreground screen the Hopper and Mount Greylock, and the downhill road leads on behind the trees as well.  This painting is a 12x16 oil on panel.

I'm still reading Walter Jackson Bate's biography of John Keats, a great young man faced with immense obstacles, who possessed an enormous gift.  Bate was also a wise man:

"In reading a poem, in contemplating any work of art, we may genuinely feel that active coalescence of the diverse.  But when we come to speak about it, we have to proceed consecutively: one thing has to be mentioned before another; in the process of noticing them individually, we find some considerations striking us more than others, if only because in our own phrasing of them we begin to tap essential concerns within ourselves; and we are led by the momentum of our own cooperating eloquence to narrow our interpretation. (A great work, of course, not only permits but invites that eager subjective response to different parts of it.) Moreover, the existence of previous commentary further specializes our attitude if we feel called upon to contribute our mite.  For in the heat of debate, or even in the honest desire to return to the amplitude of the work of art, our recoil from what we consider to be partial, single-minded interpretations encourages us to champion those details that we feel were overlooked, and to contradict or minimize considerations that we might otherwise have wished only to supplement."

Negative Capability

A Brooklyn painting from the "late day" series.  The grid is more apparent in this one.  Though it has a couple vehicles and two "figures" not including the dog, it's also quite abstract at the same time.  A 9x12 oil on panel.

In my reading about John Keats, I've encountered his "negative capability."  It sounds like something one wouldn't want to admit to, but it's quite positive, a term meaning a sympathetic openness to the world based on particulars and concreteness.  It's appealing to this painter.

Classon Avenue

A late day view on Classon Avenue towards Dean Street: a 9x12 oil on panel.  No better way to start the new year than with a new painting.  Happy New Year everyone!

Surreal Red Hook and John Keats

A surreal Red Hook painting, the eighth in the series.  Not to worry; I'll be moving to a different location for the next one.  This one is 8x10 oil on panel.

I'm currently reading the fabulous biography of John Keats by Walter Jackson Bate.  In his late teens, Keats knew he wanted to be a poet, but he did not know what to write about.  So, at first, he wrote poetry about writing poetry.  How modern.