Outdoors, Photography, and Illusionism

This morning when I was making the 9x12 charcoal drawing a jogger ran by, and he said, "You and John McDonald" which I took as a compliment.  John MacDonald is a terrific painter located in Williamstown, MA.   Later in the day I went to Haley Farm, where I painted the 9x12 oil.

Interestingly, even though both works today were done outdoors, I wanted to quote from a book on the the artist Carolyn Brady, The Watercolors of Carolyn Brady by Irene McManus, which I just finished reading.   Brady did all of her outstanding work from her photographs.

"Brady's first rule is to work from camera-generated images.  The camera intercepts a reality that lies beyond the reality available to the lazy or prejudiced human eye.  In this sense, Brady is every inch the photorealist, expressed in the distortions and illusionism fixed by the camera lens.  But she is also, once again, the Transcendentalist, the American Romantic, using the scientifically or technologically established 'real' to extract the metaphysically unreal."

"Photography is one of the keys to her art.  Her color photographs (always effortful to make) are her preparatory 'drawings.'  she thinks of herself as an 'abstract realist, using photographic illusionism.  The photographic image is very powerful illusionism.  We know that now, after doing this for so many years.' The strong lights and darks of the photograph; the subtly altered color; the fiercely concentrated close-up focus, the drastic cropping of the almost always random image--all these elements tend to steal up on commonplace reality, to abstract a truth that the naked eye would certainly miss.

   Brady is committed to material reality, but she is more interested in illusionism, the intensified reality captured by the camera.  At its finest, her work achieves a traffic between  everyday reality visible to the average human eye, and a phantom reality graspable only through the lens (or deep meditation), yielding for one tantalizing instant the truth  of the substrate."

Brady consciously used photography as a means to pursue the 'reality' behind supposed reality.  I like the comparison between meditation and the camera lens.

Top of the Hill and Why Photography Matters

An 8x 10 1/2 pastel of abstracted view where Stratton and Blair meet at the top of the hill.

I just finished reading Why Photography Matters by Jerry L. Thompson.  It matters because photography or the camera will capture more of reality than the artist wants or expects, but accepting and using this chancy outcome as part of a dialectic for development, the artist will grow and have a deeper understanding of the world.  He opposes mathema to pathema, Greek terms, to illustrate the dialectic.  Mathema is concerned with preconceptions and models of understanding while pathema is more passive and open to the unexpected (like the camera!).  He quotes Henry Adams on the danger of mathema: great artworks are mirrors, and will only show what one brings to them.  Pathema, related to the word pathos, can enable transcendence beyond the accepted or expected. The book's cover shows a photograph by Walker Evans of the Burroughs home fireplace.  There may be a known story behind the photograph, but the photograph offers much more than Evans probably ever conceived when he first made the image in 1936.

Discoveries on the Road to the Nature Center

This is the way to the Nature Center, but going in the opposite direction from yesterday's pastel.

The discoveries were not found on the road, but while browsing the Internet this morning. I found a reference to color photos made in Russia between 1909 and 1915. The dates are correct. They are fabulous. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mikhailovich_Prokudin-Gorskii. Then I did a search at commons.wikimedia.org on "pastel paintings," just for the heck of it, and found a fascinating artist with the great name of Lesser Ury who did pastels. His dates are 1861 to 1931. He was a German expressionist. Check out his work at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lesser_Ury .

Views from Sheep Hill

This weekend I visited Sheep Hill in Williamstown, MA. where I took photographs. I worked up two pastels from the photos. See below. There is no way a photograph can capture the enormity of the landscape. An earlier drawing that I did on site is posted above. I used a larger 9x12 colourfix sheet for this pastel, which wasn't large enough. I felt as if I needed something 10 x 20 feet.

The Next Day

This is the 5x7 landscape that I did last night. I have been working from digital photographs that I took a few weeks ago. I know that there are issues with working from photographs, but sometimes it can't be helped. I learned from the Morandi show at the Met that he used silk flowers for his still lifes, since they didn't wilt away, and I have read that Cezanne used fake fruit since they didn't rot. I use photographs since they make the clouds stand still.

Here's the landscape I created tonight: