Four Drawings and Equivalents

Earlier I wrote about "equivalents" within a painting, talking about forms, but not relating them to life outside the painting.  Lately, I've been reading Robert Hughes's book The Shock of the New.  He takes the concept of "equivalents" to its deeper level.

In the chapter "The Landscape of Pleasure," he writes, "Throughout this chapter I have tried to suggest that the chief tradition within which a modernist art of pleasurable sensation has been made - an art which is rigorous and intelligent, rather than the mere evocation of agreeable feelings -  is that of Symbolism: a tradition of equivalents, whereby the word (in poetry) or the colour patch and linear edge (in painting) achieve, without necessarily describing it, a harmony and exactness parallel to the satisfactions of the world.  Within the somewhat privileged space that Symbolism demands, infinite finesse is possible but conflict is not eliminated.  The artist is free to investigate the domain of feeling, not as an Expressionist splurge - the imperious I swamping everything it touches - but as a structure of exacting nuances and tonic doubts.  Such paintings cannot, by their nature, be 'movement' art.  In front of a Diebenkorn... one hears neither the chant of surging millions nor even the chorus of a 'movement,' but a measured voice, quietly and tersely explaining why this light, this colour, this intrusion of a 30-degree angle into a glazed and modulated field might be valuable in the life of the mind and of feeling."

Backair

Yesterday in the studio, I decided upon this view, which I sketched out this morning in pen, ink and wash, another square.  I've already started prepping the painting panel.  I wanted to include the overhead tracks and ductwork in the background, or should I say, backair.

Yesterday, I wrote briefly about Robert Hughes, the art critic.  I once encountered him at the Whitney Museum in New York.  I turned the corner, and he was there looking at a painting.  I recognized him immediately.  He in turned glowered at me, as if to say, "Don't say a thing to me".  I just went on casually paying him no more attention.

Late Afternoon

A 12x24 oil on canvas of Fourth Avenue near Degraw in Brooklyn, before the big snow.  It was mild, winter, and late afternoon at the time.

I've been reading Robert Hughes book Nothing If Not Critical, published in 1990.  It's a large collection of his exhibition reviews for Time magazine, mostly from the 80's.  Many of the same exhibitions I was fortunate to visit myself back then.  After 25 years, he seems to be even more spot on in terms of what he had to say.

Portrait of the Artist

The new year starts with a portrait of the artist, staring into a mirror.  In his 1992 book, The Culture of Complaint, the art critic and curmudgeon Robert Hughes, now deceased, wrote that "...there are too many artists for the base to support.  There are probably 200,000 artists in America, and assuming that each one of them makes forty works a year that yields eight million objects, most of which don't have a ghost of a chance of survival." I've read that there may now be up to two million artists in America.  Being an artist today is surely a quixotic pursuit.  One can't really do it for fame and fortune.  On the other hand, to say that the most important aspect of making art is the experience is suspect, but it may be the only thing we can fall back on.  And if we dream of making art that has value for ourselves and others, the 'experience' is what will guide that dream.

On the Path

While I work on some larger paintings, I continue to walk the woods with my sketchbook.  The top is from the hill behind the Clark Art Institute.   The snow hid some ice.  I fell down at one point leaving a complete impression of my 9x12 sketchbook in the path, not to mention some other whirling impressions.  The bottom is from the Caves Trail at Field Farm.  Today all the snow is gone.

One of the attractions to the poet Charles Wright is his love for the paintings of Morandi and Cezanne.  In a short essay on Morandi, he wrote:  "If you look hard... you will see that lucidity, permanence of idea and expression, attention to detail and vision, calm and beauty continue to be the true virtues of any art... Art is slow, as Hughes says, and propaganda is fast, and choice is what propaganda erases.  As Morandi did in his paintings,  we should stake our art on the persistence of continuous inspection.  As Cezanne did as well, we should have a "tenderness toward the mundane," a gathering to us of the quotidien.  By concentrating on things that are, we can put meaning where it should be--in direct reconstruction, in the picture itself, in the world as it is when we look at it."

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."