Spring #12 Green Violet Grid and Red Window Sill

oil on canvas

Number twelve is a square divided by six.  Two trees make a diagonal; the center two colors are lighter than the rest.  There are subtle textures between the sections.

Some people prefer directly observed landscapes/pictures compared to invented and vice versa, but both are informed by everything I see and have seen.

The Red Window Sill makes me thing of the game Mastermind which I recently played with my son now that summer vacation is in full swing.  The black, white, blue, green, red in the painting are like a row of the colored pieces but are specific hues rather than generic unmixed primaries.  Both paintings have this quality.

American painter Ellsworth Kelly is known for his color sensibility. At first I had a difficult time appreciating his shaped canvases painted with only one color.  Now I see the elegant beauty of his decisions.  He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery which is a large enough space to show his large paintings, 80" x 77" for example.  In Painting for a White Wall Kelly tries to further control the viewing experience of his piece by strongly advising the background for his work by including it in the title.  A different colored wall would completely alter the color situation he has established.

  Contemporary curators experiment with wall colors.  Several years back the MFA Boston showed Sargent's The Daughters of Edward D. Boit on a maroon wall.  Red being the complement of green, the green-blacks in the painting came out.  How Sargent may feel about this is questionable, but it did achieve a fresh view of the picture long on view in the permanent collection.  Electric lights, print media, television and computers completely changed the way artists perceive color. In addition, images can be tweaked photo editing software with the slide of a bar.  It is very different than a painter deliberately choosing the light, color, and focus for a painting.  These issues for colorists are my own and my thoughts on them pervade everything I do including playing ancient board games.

Ceramics!

Hill, Dark Trees

Winter to Spring Window

Tilting Field

all approximately 5" x 7"

The kiln works!!!!!!  I got a used kiln and a dream come true in one.  I mainly want to make landscape reliefs. I don't know if I'll make vessels, maybe hand-built incorporating relief.  These can be hung on the wall by an indentation in the back.  I love that these landscapes are made from earth, clay.  The layers of the land, its undulations; the space between expanses of field, woods, hill, and sky are the subject.  Here in the country these areas, their textures, color and expanse fill my eyeballs.  We are fortunate to have the undeveloped lot across the street and we don't feel hemmed in.   I love moving the clay, forming vision into something I can handle, like building with hammers, nails, and wood.  In addition to form there is the stretching of the ground and the sky that is over and around.   Making this experience into a solid is challenging and fascinating.  

Greek bas reliefs are narratives telling history and myth pulled out of marble with the perfection of structure embodied in that culture's architecture.  I admire them greatly, but am not interested in pursuing their figuration and Platonic purity of the ideal.  My things are crude, reflective of the mud they are made from and the mud they represent.  Beautiful in the organic qualities like the range of compost to thriving plants.  They have the cultural context of a Bostonian relocating and embracing the middle of nowhere.  Local doesn't have to mean provincial.   I am just beginning.

Spring #11 May Field and Blue Yellow Space

oil on panel

6" x 12"

18" x 34"

  "I can do whatever I want any old time."

  Post-modernism is a distrust of established canons in art but not limited to art.  It re-evaluates all western values.  The effects of this movement caused a paradigm shift prompting discord with conservatives here and abroad from right-wing Christians to the Taliban.  Examples of artistic deconstruction of traditional artistic practice are the Dada Movement (Duchamp), Fluxus, and Performance Art to name a few.  One act which shocked and then delighted me is when in 1952 Willem DeKooning erased a Robert Rauschenberg drawing.  It seemed like vandalism rebelling against a statement, negating it, pushing a fellow artist off the top of a mound like an alpha male. It was a collaboration, Rauschenberg approached DeKooning who didn't like the idea, reconsidered, and then said he wanted it to be "something he would miss."  It is an example of letting things go.  In drawing one can erase as much as draw, and additive and subtractive method as in sculpture, so this action still has its roots in traditional art.  DeKooning picked a picture with oil paint in it so it took Rauschenberg a month to erase it.  The work elicited a scandal. This interview with Rauschenberg about the event is very interesting.

  My work is fairly traditional as all painting tends to be seen now.  I vacillate in my approach as I don't feel the need to adhere to any rigid definition and can paint as I please.  While I have responsibilities like everyone else, artistically I feel as the Rolling Stones say in I'm Free, "I'm free to do what I want any old time."  It's something one wants to shut.  Even if one's song (one's creative output, oneself) is imperfect, out of time, there is value in it.  Written in the sixties, the song's reference to love reflects the need for acceptance despite social rebellion, the desire to be loved as is.

  On one of his visits to Penn, painter/teacher/critic Andrew Forge asked all of us young painters if we could think of a painter who Pollock [a fun Pollock inspired website lets you move your curser to make Pollock drip patterns] makes us see in a new way.  Also what particular qualities do we see anew?  The questions show how contemporary life can inform how we view history just as history reaches out into the present.  It is impossible to be extricated from one's time.  I said that Pollock changes how we see Vuillard in terms of passion and movement in paint handling as well as pattern.

  Despite artistic freedom, our time leaves its mark.  It is said that Americans have such a rich range of experiences and viewpoints but when an American is in a different country, say a Texan and a Connecticut Yankee, they are unified and easily identified by some quality that is strictly American.  My work shares this phenomenon.  It is American but its hard to say why.  Maybe its the aspect of freedom and the particular places I paint.  While having parameters, a set of "givens" (elements of design, a surface to paint on, etc.) there is choice.  "I'm free to do what I want..."

Spring #10 April Hudson River

oil on canvas

54" x 42"

I'm a little freaked out to tell you the truth.  I'm a little worried now that I've seen Art Weekly on a couple different monitors that some of you are seeing these overexposed.  The tablet laptop I started this on had a screen that could tilt, thus altering the brightness of the image with its angle.  Now I'm on an HP monitor for a Mac Mini and it doesn't tilt.  I cringe when I see the pictures on the blog so bright, but I don't want to change things now because you all have different computers out there and I think I just have to deal.  Alright, let's move on.

Spring #10 April Hudson River  is done from a colored pencil sketch I did on an Amtrak train from Rochester to Penn Station NYC.  The day was hazy and the colors in between the color-suck of winter and the fireworks of spring.  I think I made my own fireworks with the vibrancy of the tree line and the blue circles of water (can't quite call them droplets) coming at the viewer.  The painting makes use of linear and atmospheric perspective.  Dark gray/black dots seem connected like beads on a string or buoys.  The water had that range of silver, dark and light blues that went to purple, and white sparkles.  The hazy dots at the top gently fall down, shimmering, obscuring the hilltop.  You know, I don't think the Hudson River was quite this active, maybe it's me.

For more information on the Hudson River Valley, check out:

http://www.scenichudson.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm

Aerial View in Google Maps

Spring #9 (So Many Greens)

18" x 24"

oil on panel

As I paint dots I'm looking at other dots in paintings as well as references to circles in all the arts.  Aboriginal paintings from Australia are typically constructed of dots.  Some are done on bark. The bark connotes such a strong connection with nature that it is the substance of the image. Rather than depicting their surroundings in a literal way, the subjects are abstracted but often show nature via animals, fish, people, etc.  I found a source for their symbols.  The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia has the largest collection of indigenous Australian art outside of Australia. 

Spring #9 (So Many Greens) draws heavily on visual perception done from direct observation, thus differing from Aboriginal art.  The commonalities are rhythm, nature, immersion in a particular place and way of life, and the abstract element of the dot as a vehicle for these things.  The greens can be spliced and spliced towards yellow, blue, violet, light and dark, etc.  Even the most representational painters have to simplify.  My family often looks out on such scenes from our dining room window as we eat meals together.  My son says that the greens are actually overwhelming from the window view but not when one is outside.  It is funny but it is like being overstimulated by flashing lights in a big city.  The painting is perhaps a bit less hyperactive due to its abstraction/simplification, my processing.  Some dots are more subtle than others like the ones in the sky.  I'm looking forward to looking at it through the winter.

Spring 5 (Cabbage Field), Spring 7 (First Green), & Spring 8 (Through the Shower Door)

8"x 10"
6" x 12"

oil on panel

Maybe it is spring moving onto summer where you are, but I'm freezing my butt off with my fellow Rochesterians. It's been in the 50's and 60's lately which would have been thrilling in February but is now getting old. I stumbled upon the poem Early Spring by Rainer Maria Rilke (www.poemhunter.com is a really great site for poetry). It is about the moment when the harshness of winter and its grey are replaced by "country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees". This is the moment and subject I'm painting.

Rilke (German) falls into the category of Romanticism (1800-mid c.) which emphasized imagination and emotion as well as originality of the artist, a reaction to the reason and order of the Enlightenment after the French Revolution. Even though structure can be found in nature it was still seen as an alternative to order in its wildness (great article by Kathryn Calley Galitz, Department of 19th c. Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met). Art wasn't simply a mirror of nature anymore but also related to one's inner self. I haven't read anything reaching the conclusion that this wildness expressed the inner self, but would venture that it would after the perhaps restricting Enlightenment. Examples of Romanticism in America are the Hudson River School. Other European artists include Turner and Gericault and the poet Byron.

How did we get here after complaining that my butt is cold?! I think my painting comes out of Romanticism, although it was pejorative to be called "Romantic" in graduate school. I think that kind of romantic was the extreme, saccharine Hallmark. Painting a fluffy kitten might have been grounds for expulsion. I think my work is romantic in a similar way to the music of Andreas Sahar, which has emotion and originality as two of its many strengths. The song Take to the Sky references nature in a charged, uplifting way I can relate to. Perhaps the landscapes I paint are a tinge romanticised, but I prefer to think celebrated. Truth be told, a cabbage field looks beautiful but smells way worse than a farm full of manure.

Spring #8 was inspired by looking through my steamy glass shower door and then at the landscape through the bathroom window. My bathroom walls are turquoise and the lawn outside provided a field of spring green, a favorite of mine. The humidity provided watery distortion, effected the color, and made me think of Florida.

Spring #6 (Before the Rain)

18" x 24"

oil on panel

Sometimes I dot, sometimes I don't.

I saw this while taking my son to school in the morning. The blue and pink are both sky and the gray is road, but it doesn't have to be interpreted as such. We passed a pink flowering tree on the left, which I think is a dogwood (I don't really know trees) and a dark, purple/red/black maple on the right. There is a duality about them, the light and dark and placement in opposition, like the Yin-Yang. The pink tree is similar to the feeling of cherry trees which are celebrated here in the Washington D.C. National Cherry Blossom Festival and in Japan. In Buddhism, the cherry tree blossoms symbolize the fleeting nature of life. In contemporary Japanese culture, the cherry blossom can even be found in tattoos symbolizing women's beauty and sexuality. A classic image is this one by Hiroshige.

The trees flank center stage to reveal the area of central importance, atmospheric, beyond reach yet there.