art notes
A cobbler makes shoes, a carpenter makes tables, and what does an artist do?
He does nothing; he creates? This is unclear and suspicious. - Osip Brik
He does nothing; he creates? This is unclear and suspicious. - Osip Brik
One kind of artist puts too little distance between his work and its subject matter, so that, for all the irony—that great alibi of contemporary art—that its admirers read into it, it merely serves back to us the banality of everyday life, from which it takes off. The other kind of artist can take hold of the most ordinary objects, and, by dipping them in some deep-down recess of his mind, will turn them into works of true reflexivity. - Richard Wollheim on Wayne Thiebaud
The New Art Zoo
by Ron Zito
“The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting.” -- William Carlos Williams
Imagine one morning you get an urge to go to the zoo. You’ve heard all about the brand new animal-friendly enclosures
that have been built, and the new exotic species that have taken up residence at the zoo. With great anticipation you pay your money and walk in through the flashy new entrance. Directly in front of you is the House of Cats, where all the lions, tigers, and jaguars should be lolling about in the morning sun. But for some reason there are no big cats in sight. Instead they’ve been replaced with metal and cardboard cutouts that barely resemble the real thing, or don’t resemble them at all. A sign in front of the enclosure tells you: “The Zoo has embarked on an exciting new program to educate the viewing public. The Zoo will now feature real animals instead of the fake ones we’ve been showing you for years. Replicas can still be seen in some older sections of the zoo.”
Everywhere you look the animals that you have grown accustomed to seeing are nowhere to be found. As you walk around the zoo you notice that other people are just as perplexed as you are. Families with children are especially hard-pressed. Mothers try to comfort their bawling toddlers as they push their strollers around Primate Pastiche, where the entertaining hairy denizens have been replaced with clean, shiny metal boxes. You spot another sign that states: “The gorillas, orangutans, macaques, and golden tamarinds that you were used to seeing were only illusions. We are confident that opened-minded visitors will develop a taste for the real animals that the Zoo has recently acquired to replace the outdated representations.”
You also notice that an increasing number of people are converging on the old animal enclosures where the replicas are now kept. The zoo administration has decided to have a special exhibit of animal fakes to satisfy the increasing demands of their financial officers.
When your day at the zoo comes to an end, you return home questioning the whole experience. You miss the old familiar fakes, but you have to admit, some of the real animals are interesting and well-crafted. You decide to have an open mind about the whole thing and try to understand and enjoy the new animals. So you watch all the new nature programs on PBS, you attend lectures at the zoo, you even try to read the latest zoo member newsletter, confident that your new knowledge will overcome your confusion and misgivings about the new zoo. But enlightenment does not come easy. You encounter statements such as this: “Zoos of the future will have no need for actual animals. Visitors will be able to visualize the animals in their enclosures.” And this: “The idea that a zoo should be an exclusive province of animals is an elitist throwback to Western thought. Other forms of life such as viruses, bacteria, and rocks should also be included in zoo collections.” And this: “Even the idea of a zoo is outmoded. We need to do away with traditional enclosures. The era of zoos is over.” And then you wake up from your dream.
If this nightmarish day at the zoo seems far-fetched, it is, for now. But let’s leave zoo-keeping behind and venture forth into another area of our culture that is also considered a prized societal benefit: the world of art. The average museum-goer would not find the above scenario so preposterous, since he has already encountered such a situation, and, alas, has not woken up from the dream. How many art lovers have found themselves scratching their heads in front of a totally black canvas, or a giant ashtray filled with cigarette butts, or a set of vacuum cleaners posing inside Plexiglas boxes, or, the mother of them all: a urinal tipped on its side and titled Fountain.
Marcel Duchamp, creator of Fountain (1917) and originator of the “ready-made,” questioned the visual basis of art. In 1946 he said, “I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was interested in ideas -- not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.” Duchamp thought that despite the original contributions of Picasso and Matisse, art was still primarily “retinal,” meaning that the artist and the viewer were only using their eyes to decide what was art. As far as Fountain was concerned, Duchamp (who had signed the urinal: R. Mutt) said, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view -- [he] created a new thought for that object.” In line with these remarks he also said, “the ideas . . . are more important than the actual visual realization.” So suppose you walk into the plumbing section of Home Depot. There you see an entire aisle of toilet fixtures and exclaim, “What are these works of art doing in here? Has Home Depot gone into the art business?” Just imagine the looks you’d get (as the wary employees called security), and if you proceeded to sign all the white porcelain bowls with a black magic marker, the unreasonable store management would have you arrested for destruction of property. If only they knew something about Duchamp they might understand your point, that now it is up to each individual to decide what is art. And if you were lucky enough to plead your case in front of an enlightened judge, you might even say to the plaintiffs, “Why stick to toilets? Practically everything in the store could be art if you choose to call it that. Don't you know what you've got here?!”
What prompted the crossing of such a divide in the history of art? In the past, artists had been in the service of the aristocracy and the church. The two were entwined in a Europe where church and state were sometimes one and the same. Casting off the chains of the feudal system, with its privileged aristocracy, also meant casting off the theology of the church. What it meant for the arts was a loss of patronage from both. Torn loose from the service of these twin employers, artists and composers were soon to find themselves in problematic circumstances. They had more freedom to create, but it became more difficult to find commissions. A wealthy merchant class took its place for awhile, but with the industrial revolution and the enormous growth of the middle class, artists now had to sell their work through art dealers and salon shows.
But the changing political scene of the late 1800’s was also to effect the rising middle class, which thrived under capitalism. The bourgeoisie still clung to pictures of people, scenes from nature, and historical events. By and large these were images of beauty. With the growth of revolutionary materialist political systems, not only capitalism, but the culture it had created was under attack. Artists reflected this condemnation and tried to find novel ways to distance themselves from the bourgeoisie, while at the same time relying on its money.
It is perhaps no coincidence that so many art movements began to act and sound like political parties. Most of them, like Dada, the Surrealists, and the Futurists, had totalitarian tendencies, mostly of the socialist variety. The issuing of manifestos, demands of group loyalty, the advocation of anarchy, and the vilification of the bourgeoisie were common traits. It is especially illuminating to read what was said about the middle class. Jean Arp sneered, “The normally constituted bourgeois possesses rather less imagination than a worm and has, in place of a heart, a larger-than-life-sized corn which troubles him when there is a change in the weather - the stock market weather.” In 1919 Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School said, “The intellectual bourgeois . . . has proved himself unfit to be the bearer of a German culture. New, intellectually undeveloped levels of our people are rising from the depths. They are our chief hope.” Duchamp himself, the unofficial founder of Dada, also had contempt for all things bourgeois. Francis Picabia was a fellow artist and one of his closest companions. Picabia’s wife wrote in her memoirs that the two “emulated one another in their extraordinary adherence to paradoxical, destructive principles, in their blasphemies and inhumanities which were directed not only against the old myths of art, but against all the foundations of life in general. . . . Better than by any rational method, they thus pursued the disintegration of the concept of art, substituting a personal dynamism . . . for the codified values of formal Beauty.” She perceptively called them, “forays of demoralization.”
Duchamp’s iconoclasm almost seems refreshing after we examine what was to be unleashed on the art world of the twentieth century. For it was to become an age of manifestos. In Arthur Danto’s book, After the End of Art, he cites historian Phyllis Freeman’s research on art manifestos in which “she had unearthed roughly five hundred examples, some of which -- the surrealist manifesto, the futurist manifesto -- are nearly as well known as the works they sought to validate.” Philosophy had become the muse of art. “To accept the art as art meant accepting the philosophy that enfranchised it,” says Danto.
This reliance on philosophy may have had its birth in the remarks of Georg Friedrich Hegel. Danto quotes from Hegel’s work Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art: “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.” Hegel also states, “Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.” It is as if Hegel in 1828 peered into a crystal ball and saw the defining character of Modern art: its self-conscious preoccupation with ideology.
With ideologies came the manifestos. Each new movement would plant its flag in the unexplored territory of its own making and declare itself the only true art. One -ism followed another in a never-ending reaction to the preceding one: cubism, futurism, orphism, vorticism, rayonism, dada, de stijl, purism, surrealism, ad infinitum. Whereas it has usually been future generations that give names to the past -- e.g., Renaissance, Baroque -- in the twentieth century the art theories were named as they were being invented. No wonder G. K. Chesterton would say, “. . . the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit".
An early example of this dogma was the one set forth by the Futurists. Their manifesto of April 11, 1910 (an exact date, no less!) included these declarations:
1. That all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified.
2. That it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms “harmony” and “good taste . . .”
3. That the art critics are either useless or harmful.
4. That all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed.
Perhaps the paradigmatic example came from the Surrealist movement. In 1924 André Breton put forth his First Surrealist Manifesto. He defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the true function of thought -- thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all esthetic or moral preoccupations.” Surrealism became known for its reliance on Freudian theories of the subconscious mind. In the works of Dali and De Chirico we see how these evocative dream-states were worked out on canvas. But to Breton, more important than the visual imagery was the philosophical discovery of what art essentially is, and anyone who strayed from the definition was a traitor to the cause. For example, in 1926 the two Surrealist painters Max Ernst and Joan Miró accepted a commission from Serge Diaghilev to design stage sets for the ballet Romeo and Juliet. This infuriated Breton so much that he published a pamphlet condemning the two artists for un-Surrealist activities. On opening night the Surrealists staged a loud disruptive protest inside the theater. Years later Ernst, Miró, and Jean Arp were “expelled” from the Surrealist movement for accepting awards at the Venice Biennale.
Abstract Expressionism produced some of the most well-known artists of the twentieth century, men like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. But it also produced one of the most famous critics in the history of art, or rather, Clement Greenberg may have single-handedly created the Abstract Expressionist movement. Greenberg believed that a modernist painting, as exemplified by Abstract Expressionism, should not create a three-dimensional illusion, that the flatness of the picture plane should not be misused. He was such a staunch defender of this form of modernism that to him all other forms of painting were impure and regressive. “Realistic, naturalistic art has dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art,” Greenberg would say after Pop Art had supplanted his beloved Abstract Expressionism. In 1944 he would have this to say about an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: "The extreme eclecticism now prevailing is unhealthy, and it should be counteracted, even at the risk of dogmatism and intolerance." At the height of World War II it is astounding to hear Greenberg make statements that sound like they come from Nazi Party literature condemning “degenerate” art.
Contrast the doctrinaire Greenberg with the nihilistic nonchalance of Duchamp, who once gave this irreverent summation of the art world:
"Art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People speak of it with great, religious reverence, but I don't see why it is to be so much revered. I'm afraid I'm an agnostic when it comes to art. I don't believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it's probably very useful for many people, very sedative, but as a religion it's not even as good as God."
Tell that to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where in 2002 they temporarily moved to a space in Queens. MOMA commemorated the move with a “ceremonial procession.” In MOMA’s own account of the parade it resembled a pagan celebration of its favorite gods:
Departing from 11 West 53 Street, moving over the Queensboro Bridge, marching up Queens Boulevard, and ending at MoMA QNS, the performance was evocative of both a saint’s day procession and a secular celebration. Reproductions of some of the Museum’s most well-known works, including Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Albert Giacometti’s Standing Woman, and Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel were carried on palanquins or litters, as was artist Kiki Smith. Uniformed participants spread rose petals along the route throughout the three-hour procession, and were accompanied by a Peruvian band.
As far as God is concerned, Art may have become the new god. Arthur Danto believes that the history of art (but not the production of art) ended in 1964 with the unveiling of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. He believes that if Warhol’s creation could be called art, then anything could be art. Because there was no way to tell apart Brillo Box from a real box of Brillo, Danto wondered what made one art and the other just an ordinary household product. In one of the more revealing sections of his book After the End of Art, Danto speaks of the “transfiguration” that such a work accomplished. “Transfiguration is a religious concept. It means the adoration of the ordinary, as, in its original appearance, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew . . . .” Danto is right to say that Warhol somehow got the art world to look at an ordinary box of Brillo with something close to adoration. (After all, someone paid a lot of money for it.) Where we can disagree with Danto is in his depiction of the passage in Matthew 17 as ordinary. Whether or not we believe in this incident from the Gospels, there is nothing ordinary about the description of what happened: the face of Jesus shone like the sun and his garments became as white as light; Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus; and when a voice spoke from out of the cloud, the disciples fell on their faces in fear. This was certainly an extra-ordinary experience, far removed from the banality of a box of scouring pads. The keepers of this faith in the ordinary may have raised up the Brillo Box to the pantheon of Art, but most people are still reluctant to get down on bended knee. It is difficult enough for people to believe in God, let alone a golden calf in the shape of a Brillo box. But isn’t that exactly what it takes when we find ourselves face to face with such an icon in any of our contemporary museums of art? It takes a leap of faith, or, at least, a suspension of disbelief. To Danto, seeing is not believing, but instead, believing is seeing.
But this is not to say that there is never a “transfiguration.” Surely great masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel, Rembrandt’s self portraits, Monet’s water lilies, Bernini’s unsurpassed sculpture, or Vermeer’s light-filled interiors of Dutch domestic life do seem to accomplish a transformation from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Most of us do not need to be convinced or have anything explained to us when we stand before these works of art. It takes no leap of faith to “adore” these creations.
But doesn’t the Brillo Box remain ordinary no matter how hard we try? According to Danto it does not, but we need to turn to art theory instead of religion to understand the transformation. In his examination of Robert Ryman’s monochrome paintings he says that in order to uncover their meanings “we would have to look closely at Ryman’s own thoughts and motivations. That the paintings are white and square will not tell us much: monochrome paintings underdetermine their interpretations.” This is why Danto believes criticism will always have a role to play in the art of painting. Taking it further, Danto says, “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry -- an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world. . . . No one unfamiliar with history or with artistic theory could see these as art, and hence it was the history and the theory of the object, more than anything palpably visible, that had to be appealed to in order to see them as art.” It’s no wonder that Clement Greenberg could say with a straight face that “all original art looks ugly at first.” Leo Steinberg, the art critic who supplanted Greenberg (art movements aren’t the only things put out to pasture), said that Modern art “is always born in anxiety” and that its very function is to “transmit this anxiety to the spectator.” Surely, if art has become that difficult to enjoy then shouldn’t our museums be reading us a caveat emptor before they take our money?
In his book What Good Are the Arts? John Carey takes issue with Danto’s idea that we must know the motivation of the artist in order to understand their work. “With the vast majority of the artworks that fill our museums and galleries we have no access whatever to the creator’s intentions. In much early art even the creators’ identities are unknown. Whether they intended to produce ‘art’ in our sense at all seems, as we have said, highly unlikely. Judging works by their intentions is a purely circular exercise.”
The art of the past was full of mythological and religious symbols that most of us are not familiar with today, and later vanitas paintings also had their own symbolic code. But at least we have access to this knowledge, and it does not take much effort to understand the logic behind the representation of a particular flower, fruit or animal. Looking at today’s art there does not seem to be a common logic to the intentions of the artist. If symbols are being employed, then they seem to be locked inside the mind of each autonomous artist. How unfortunate that we can sometimes understand the art of a thousand years ago better than the art of our own contemporaries. But maybe this is the point of most contemporary art. Maybe we are not supposed to understand it -- maybe the disconnect is the point. As a mirror of our own times perhaps it is a good one, showing us the nihilistic relativity and autonomy in the air we breathe, and the non-transmission of one culture to the next. Danto’s idea that one must be properly informed to understand contemporary art is born out of a kind of art gnosticism. Only the enlightened inner circle who shares the secret knowledge, or as Tom Wolfe would say, the art village of New York, can understand the art of our own age, and they happen to prefer it that way. Oddly enough, Wolfe concurs with Danto when he says, “frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.” If this is the case, then a blind man should be able to understand a work of art just as well, or maybe even better than a sighted person, as long as he understands art history and theory. We should be happy for the blind man, but then where is the importance of creating visual art anymore? Being able to see might actually be a hindrance to understanding art.
What does the contemporary artist want to say today? Is he like Duchamp, who according to Donald Kuspit in The End of Art, wanted to mock and defeat the spectator and ridicule posterity? The ready-made “defeats every attempt to bring it into contact with the external world, remaining the medium and symbol of the artist’s inner world.” In 2001 an installation by Damien Hirst in the window of a London gallery was taken apart and discarded by a cleaning man. The work consisted of half-full coffee cups, ashtrays with cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, and other detritus. This Hirst original was reported to have a sales value in the six figure range, but the unwitting cleaning man said, “It didn’t look much like art to me. So I cleared it all in bin bags, and I dumped it.” Hirst thought the entire incident was “hysterically funny,” and a gallery manager said . . . “since his art is all about the relationship between art and the everyday, he laughed harder than anyone else.”
I doubt that anyone would’ve been laughing had they found the Mona Lisa in the garbage, nor would the cleaning man have mistaken it for trash, but when art is just the leavings from everyday life it is not easy to tell the difference. Kuspit says that according to Hirst, “life is more interesting than art, and art is only interesting when it is mistaken for everyday life, even if that means it loses its identity as art,” which it does when it is exhibited in an art gallery. It is Kuspit’s contention that “the more completely modern an art seems, the more indifferent it seems to human concerns -- which suggests just how humanly indifferent we feel the modern world to be -- and thus the more unconsciously disillusioning, however consciously we celebrate the advance of art as such. However unintentionally, the doctrine of art for art’s sake -- the belief in the absolute autonomy of art -- is a defense of art’s right to be indifferent to human concerns.”
In a conversation with Tom Wolfe, Milton Glaser, author of Art is Work, says, “The sadness is that there is this contempt for narration and for storytelling. Why do we eliminate this fundamental idea of reference to the observable world? Who benefits from it? . . . Why storytelling becomes unclean is very strange. Suddenly the idea of depicting any kind of reference to a narrative objective has become undesirable.”
In the 1940’s when Edward Hopper remained committed to his own brand of realism, despite the opprobrium of the art world, he thought that the craze for abstraction was cutting off the painter from real life: “We are all bound to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color, and design. We would be leaving out a great deal that I consider worthwhile expressing in painting. . . ."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was not one to think that art could be “indifferent to human concerns.” In his 1972 Nobel Prize Lecture, he gave this assessment of the artist’s duty: “The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.” It would be easy to conclude that the art world is unaware that it is committing suicide, but Solzhenitsyn goes on to say that art is not dead. “All who predict that art is disintegrating, that it has outgrown its forms, and that it is dying are wrong and will be wrong. We will die, but art will remain. Will we, before we go under, ever understand all its facets and all its ends?” He was convinced that a work of art “contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.”
We can only surmise what Solzhenitsyn thought of art like Hirst’s gallery installation, but he probably would have agreed with these remarks from Kuspit, “The moment of revelation occurs not when art and life are blurred, but when one becomes clear-eyed -- like Hirst’s cleaning man -- and realizes that what presents itself as art is just a leftover piece of life. One has awakened from a bad dream.”
Works Cited:
Carey, John, What Good are the Arts?. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Chesterton, G. K., What’s Wrong with the World. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956.
Danto, Arthur C., After the End of Art, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Hunter, Sam, John Jacobus and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art. New York: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004.
Kuspit, Donald, The End of Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Matheny, Lynn, “Edward Hopper.” American Art Review Oct. 2007: 166-73.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.
Tomkins, Calvin, and the Editors of Time Life Books, The World of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Time Inc., 1966
Williams, William Carlos, A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. Ed. Bram Dijkstra. New York: New Directions Books, 1978.
Wolfe, Tom, From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Pocket Books, 1981.
-----. The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Wolfe, Tom, and Milton Glaser. “In Conversation.” Graphis. FindArticles.com. (Jan/Feb 2001). 10 Oct 2008
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3992/is_200101/ai_n8934033
by Ron Zito
“The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting.” -- William Carlos Williams
Imagine one morning you get an urge to go to the zoo. You’ve heard all about the brand new animal-friendly enclosures
that have been built, and the new exotic species that have taken up residence at the zoo. With great anticipation you pay your money and walk in through the flashy new entrance. Directly in front of you is the House of Cats, where all the lions, tigers, and jaguars should be lolling about in the morning sun. But for some reason there are no big cats in sight. Instead they’ve been replaced with metal and cardboard cutouts that barely resemble the real thing, or don’t resemble them at all. A sign in front of the enclosure tells you: “The Zoo has embarked on an exciting new program to educate the viewing public. The Zoo will now feature real animals instead of the fake ones we’ve been showing you for years. Replicas can still be seen in some older sections of the zoo.”
Everywhere you look the animals that you have grown accustomed to seeing are nowhere to be found. As you walk around the zoo you notice that other people are just as perplexed as you are. Families with children are especially hard-pressed. Mothers try to comfort their bawling toddlers as they push their strollers around Primate Pastiche, where the entertaining hairy denizens have been replaced with clean, shiny metal boxes. You spot another sign that states: “The gorillas, orangutans, macaques, and golden tamarinds that you were used to seeing were only illusions. We are confident that opened-minded visitors will develop a taste for the real animals that the Zoo has recently acquired to replace the outdated representations.”
You also notice that an increasing number of people are converging on the old animal enclosures where the replicas are now kept. The zoo administration has decided to have a special exhibit of animal fakes to satisfy the increasing demands of their financial officers.
When your day at the zoo comes to an end, you return home questioning the whole experience. You miss the old familiar fakes, but you have to admit, some of the real animals are interesting and well-crafted. You decide to have an open mind about the whole thing and try to understand and enjoy the new animals. So you watch all the new nature programs on PBS, you attend lectures at the zoo, you even try to read the latest zoo member newsletter, confident that your new knowledge will overcome your confusion and misgivings about the new zoo. But enlightenment does not come easy. You encounter statements such as this: “Zoos of the future will have no need for actual animals. Visitors will be able to visualize the animals in their enclosures.” And this: “The idea that a zoo should be an exclusive province of animals is an elitist throwback to Western thought. Other forms of life such as viruses, bacteria, and rocks should also be included in zoo collections.” And this: “Even the idea of a zoo is outmoded. We need to do away with traditional enclosures. The era of zoos is over.” And then you wake up from your dream.
If this nightmarish day at the zoo seems far-fetched, it is, for now. But let’s leave zoo-keeping behind and venture forth into another area of our culture that is also considered a prized societal benefit: the world of art. The average museum-goer would not find the above scenario so preposterous, since he has already encountered such a situation, and, alas, has not woken up from the dream. How many art lovers have found themselves scratching their heads in front of a totally black canvas, or a giant ashtray filled with cigarette butts, or a set of vacuum cleaners posing inside Plexiglas boxes, or, the mother of them all: a urinal tipped on its side and titled Fountain.
Marcel Duchamp, creator of Fountain (1917) and originator of the “ready-made,” questioned the visual basis of art. In 1946 he said, “I wanted to get away from the physical aspect of painting. I was interested in ideas -- not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.” Duchamp thought that despite the original contributions of Picasso and Matisse, art was still primarily “retinal,” meaning that the artist and the viewer were only using their eyes to decide what was art. As far as Fountain was concerned, Duchamp (who had signed the urinal: R. Mutt) said, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view -- [he] created a new thought for that object.” In line with these remarks he also said, “the ideas . . . are more important than the actual visual realization.” So suppose you walk into the plumbing section of Home Depot. There you see an entire aisle of toilet fixtures and exclaim, “What are these works of art doing in here? Has Home Depot gone into the art business?” Just imagine the looks you’d get (as the wary employees called security), and if you proceeded to sign all the white porcelain bowls with a black magic marker, the unreasonable store management would have you arrested for destruction of property. If only they knew something about Duchamp they might understand your point, that now it is up to each individual to decide what is art. And if you were lucky enough to plead your case in front of an enlightened judge, you might even say to the plaintiffs, “Why stick to toilets? Practically everything in the store could be art if you choose to call it that. Don't you know what you've got here?!”
What prompted the crossing of such a divide in the history of art? In the past, artists had been in the service of the aristocracy and the church. The two were entwined in a Europe where church and state were sometimes one and the same. Casting off the chains of the feudal system, with its privileged aristocracy, also meant casting off the theology of the church. What it meant for the arts was a loss of patronage from both. Torn loose from the service of these twin employers, artists and composers were soon to find themselves in problematic circumstances. They had more freedom to create, but it became more difficult to find commissions. A wealthy merchant class took its place for awhile, but with the industrial revolution and the enormous growth of the middle class, artists now had to sell their work through art dealers and salon shows.
But the changing political scene of the late 1800’s was also to effect the rising middle class, which thrived under capitalism. The bourgeoisie still clung to pictures of people, scenes from nature, and historical events. By and large these were images of beauty. With the growth of revolutionary materialist political systems, not only capitalism, but the culture it had created was under attack. Artists reflected this condemnation and tried to find novel ways to distance themselves from the bourgeoisie, while at the same time relying on its money.
It is perhaps no coincidence that so many art movements began to act and sound like political parties. Most of them, like Dada, the Surrealists, and the Futurists, had totalitarian tendencies, mostly of the socialist variety. The issuing of manifestos, demands of group loyalty, the advocation of anarchy, and the vilification of the bourgeoisie were common traits. It is especially illuminating to read what was said about the middle class. Jean Arp sneered, “The normally constituted bourgeois possesses rather less imagination than a worm and has, in place of a heart, a larger-than-life-sized corn which troubles him when there is a change in the weather - the stock market weather.” In 1919 Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School said, “The intellectual bourgeois . . . has proved himself unfit to be the bearer of a German culture. New, intellectually undeveloped levels of our people are rising from the depths. They are our chief hope.” Duchamp himself, the unofficial founder of Dada, also had contempt for all things bourgeois. Francis Picabia was a fellow artist and one of his closest companions. Picabia’s wife wrote in her memoirs that the two “emulated one another in their extraordinary adherence to paradoxical, destructive principles, in their blasphemies and inhumanities which were directed not only against the old myths of art, but against all the foundations of life in general. . . . Better than by any rational method, they thus pursued the disintegration of the concept of art, substituting a personal dynamism . . . for the codified values of formal Beauty.” She perceptively called them, “forays of demoralization.”
Duchamp’s iconoclasm almost seems refreshing after we examine what was to be unleashed on the art world of the twentieth century. For it was to become an age of manifestos. In Arthur Danto’s book, After the End of Art, he cites historian Phyllis Freeman’s research on art manifestos in which “she had unearthed roughly five hundred examples, some of which -- the surrealist manifesto, the futurist manifesto -- are nearly as well known as the works they sought to validate.” Philosophy had become the muse of art. “To accept the art as art meant accepting the philosophy that enfranchised it,” says Danto.
This reliance on philosophy may have had its birth in the remarks of Georg Friedrich Hegel. Danto quotes from Hegel’s work Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art: “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.” Hegel also states, “Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.” It is as if Hegel in 1828 peered into a crystal ball and saw the defining character of Modern art: its self-conscious preoccupation with ideology.
With ideologies came the manifestos. Each new movement would plant its flag in the unexplored territory of its own making and declare itself the only true art. One -ism followed another in a never-ending reaction to the preceding one: cubism, futurism, orphism, vorticism, rayonism, dada, de stijl, purism, surrealism, ad infinitum. Whereas it has usually been future generations that give names to the past -- e.g., Renaissance, Baroque -- in the twentieth century the art theories were named as they were being invented. No wonder G. K. Chesterton would say, “. . . the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit".
An early example of this dogma was the one set forth by the Futurists. Their manifesto of April 11, 1910 (an exact date, no less!) included these declarations:
1. That all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified.
2. That it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms “harmony” and “good taste . . .”
3. That the art critics are either useless or harmful.
4. That all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed.
Perhaps the paradigmatic example came from the Surrealist movement. In 1924 André Breton put forth his First Surrealist Manifesto. He defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the true function of thought -- thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all esthetic or moral preoccupations.” Surrealism became known for its reliance on Freudian theories of the subconscious mind. In the works of Dali and De Chirico we see how these evocative dream-states were worked out on canvas. But to Breton, more important than the visual imagery was the philosophical discovery of what art essentially is, and anyone who strayed from the definition was a traitor to the cause. For example, in 1926 the two Surrealist painters Max Ernst and Joan Miró accepted a commission from Serge Diaghilev to design stage sets for the ballet Romeo and Juliet. This infuriated Breton so much that he published a pamphlet condemning the two artists for un-Surrealist activities. On opening night the Surrealists staged a loud disruptive protest inside the theater. Years later Ernst, Miró, and Jean Arp were “expelled” from the Surrealist movement for accepting awards at the Venice Biennale.
Abstract Expressionism produced some of the most well-known artists of the twentieth century, men like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. But it also produced one of the most famous critics in the history of art, or rather, Clement Greenberg may have single-handedly created the Abstract Expressionist movement. Greenberg believed that a modernist painting, as exemplified by Abstract Expressionism, should not create a three-dimensional illusion, that the flatness of the picture plane should not be misused. He was such a staunch defender of this form of modernism that to him all other forms of painting were impure and regressive. “Realistic, naturalistic art has dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art,” Greenberg would say after Pop Art had supplanted his beloved Abstract Expressionism. In 1944 he would have this to say about an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: "The extreme eclecticism now prevailing is unhealthy, and it should be counteracted, even at the risk of dogmatism and intolerance." At the height of World War II it is astounding to hear Greenberg make statements that sound like they come from Nazi Party literature condemning “degenerate” art.
Contrast the doctrinaire Greenberg with the nihilistic nonchalance of Duchamp, who once gave this irreverent summation of the art world:
"Art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People speak of it with great, religious reverence, but I don't see why it is to be so much revered. I'm afraid I'm an agnostic when it comes to art. I don't believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it's probably very useful for many people, very sedative, but as a religion it's not even as good as God."
Tell that to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where in 2002 they temporarily moved to a space in Queens. MOMA commemorated the move with a “ceremonial procession.” In MOMA’s own account of the parade it resembled a pagan celebration of its favorite gods:
Departing from 11 West 53 Street, moving over the Queensboro Bridge, marching up Queens Boulevard, and ending at MoMA QNS, the performance was evocative of both a saint’s day procession and a secular celebration. Reproductions of some of the Museum’s most well-known works, including Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Albert Giacometti’s Standing Woman, and Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel were carried on palanquins or litters, as was artist Kiki Smith. Uniformed participants spread rose petals along the route throughout the three-hour procession, and were accompanied by a Peruvian band.
As far as God is concerned, Art may have become the new god. Arthur Danto believes that the history of art (but not the production of art) ended in 1964 with the unveiling of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. He believes that if Warhol’s creation could be called art, then anything could be art. Because there was no way to tell apart Brillo Box from a real box of Brillo, Danto wondered what made one art and the other just an ordinary household product. In one of the more revealing sections of his book After the End of Art, Danto speaks of the “transfiguration” that such a work accomplished. “Transfiguration is a religious concept. It means the adoration of the ordinary, as, in its original appearance, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew . . . .” Danto is right to say that Warhol somehow got the art world to look at an ordinary box of Brillo with something close to adoration. (After all, someone paid a lot of money for it.) Where we can disagree with Danto is in his depiction of the passage in Matthew 17 as ordinary. Whether or not we believe in this incident from the Gospels, there is nothing ordinary about the description of what happened: the face of Jesus shone like the sun and his garments became as white as light; Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus; and when a voice spoke from out of the cloud, the disciples fell on their faces in fear. This was certainly an extra-ordinary experience, far removed from the banality of a box of scouring pads. The keepers of this faith in the ordinary may have raised up the Brillo Box to the pantheon of Art, but most people are still reluctant to get down on bended knee. It is difficult enough for people to believe in God, let alone a golden calf in the shape of a Brillo box. But isn’t that exactly what it takes when we find ourselves face to face with such an icon in any of our contemporary museums of art? It takes a leap of faith, or, at least, a suspension of disbelief. To Danto, seeing is not believing, but instead, believing is seeing.
But this is not to say that there is never a “transfiguration.” Surely great masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel, Rembrandt’s self portraits, Monet’s water lilies, Bernini’s unsurpassed sculpture, or Vermeer’s light-filled interiors of Dutch domestic life do seem to accomplish a transformation from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Most of us do not need to be convinced or have anything explained to us when we stand before these works of art. It takes no leap of faith to “adore” these creations.
But doesn’t the Brillo Box remain ordinary no matter how hard we try? According to Danto it does not, but we need to turn to art theory instead of religion to understand the transformation. In his examination of Robert Ryman’s monochrome paintings he says that in order to uncover their meanings “we would have to look closely at Ryman’s own thoughts and motivations. That the paintings are white and square will not tell us much: monochrome paintings underdetermine their interpretations.” This is why Danto believes criticism will always have a role to play in the art of painting. Taking it further, Danto says, “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry -- an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world. . . . No one unfamiliar with history or with artistic theory could see these as art, and hence it was the history and the theory of the object, more than anything palpably visible, that had to be appealed to in order to see them as art.” It’s no wonder that Clement Greenberg could say with a straight face that “all original art looks ugly at first.” Leo Steinberg, the art critic who supplanted Greenberg (art movements aren’t the only things put out to pasture), said that Modern art “is always born in anxiety” and that its very function is to “transmit this anxiety to the spectator.” Surely, if art has become that difficult to enjoy then shouldn’t our museums be reading us a caveat emptor before they take our money?
In his book What Good Are the Arts? John Carey takes issue with Danto’s idea that we must know the motivation of the artist in order to understand their work. “With the vast majority of the artworks that fill our museums and galleries we have no access whatever to the creator’s intentions. In much early art even the creators’ identities are unknown. Whether they intended to produce ‘art’ in our sense at all seems, as we have said, highly unlikely. Judging works by their intentions is a purely circular exercise.”
The art of the past was full of mythological and religious symbols that most of us are not familiar with today, and later vanitas paintings also had their own symbolic code. But at least we have access to this knowledge, and it does not take much effort to understand the logic behind the representation of a particular flower, fruit or animal. Looking at today’s art there does not seem to be a common logic to the intentions of the artist. If symbols are being employed, then they seem to be locked inside the mind of each autonomous artist. How unfortunate that we can sometimes understand the art of a thousand years ago better than the art of our own contemporaries. But maybe this is the point of most contemporary art. Maybe we are not supposed to understand it -- maybe the disconnect is the point. As a mirror of our own times perhaps it is a good one, showing us the nihilistic relativity and autonomy in the air we breathe, and the non-transmission of one culture to the next. Danto’s idea that one must be properly informed to understand contemporary art is born out of a kind of art gnosticism. Only the enlightened inner circle who shares the secret knowledge, or as Tom Wolfe would say, the art village of New York, can understand the art of our own age, and they happen to prefer it that way. Oddly enough, Wolfe concurs with Danto when he says, “frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.” If this is the case, then a blind man should be able to understand a work of art just as well, or maybe even better than a sighted person, as long as he understands art history and theory. We should be happy for the blind man, but then where is the importance of creating visual art anymore? Being able to see might actually be a hindrance to understanding art.
What does the contemporary artist want to say today? Is he like Duchamp, who according to Donald Kuspit in The End of Art, wanted to mock and defeat the spectator and ridicule posterity? The ready-made “defeats every attempt to bring it into contact with the external world, remaining the medium and symbol of the artist’s inner world.” In 2001 an installation by Damien Hirst in the window of a London gallery was taken apart and discarded by a cleaning man. The work consisted of half-full coffee cups, ashtrays with cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, and other detritus. This Hirst original was reported to have a sales value in the six figure range, but the unwitting cleaning man said, “It didn’t look much like art to me. So I cleared it all in bin bags, and I dumped it.” Hirst thought the entire incident was “hysterically funny,” and a gallery manager said . . . “since his art is all about the relationship between art and the everyday, he laughed harder than anyone else.”
I doubt that anyone would’ve been laughing had they found the Mona Lisa in the garbage, nor would the cleaning man have mistaken it for trash, but when art is just the leavings from everyday life it is not easy to tell the difference. Kuspit says that according to Hirst, “life is more interesting than art, and art is only interesting when it is mistaken for everyday life, even if that means it loses its identity as art,” which it does when it is exhibited in an art gallery. It is Kuspit’s contention that “the more completely modern an art seems, the more indifferent it seems to human concerns -- which suggests just how humanly indifferent we feel the modern world to be -- and thus the more unconsciously disillusioning, however consciously we celebrate the advance of art as such. However unintentionally, the doctrine of art for art’s sake -- the belief in the absolute autonomy of art -- is a defense of art’s right to be indifferent to human concerns.”
In a conversation with Tom Wolfe, Milton Glaser, author of Art is Work, says, “The sadness is that there is this contempt for narration and for storytelling. Why do we eliminate this fundamental idea of reference to the observable world? Who benefits from it? . . . Why storytelling becomes unclean is very strange. Suddenly the idea of depicting any kind of reference to a narrative objective has become undesirable.”
In the 1940’s when Edward Hopper remained committed to his own brand of realism, despite the opprobrium of the art world, he thought that the craze for abstraction was cutting off the painter from real life: “We are all bound to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color, and design. We would be leaving out a great deal that I consider worthwhile expressing in painting. . . ."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was not one to think that art could be “indifferent to human concerns.” In his 1972 Nobel Prize Lecture, he gave this assessment of the artist’s duty: “The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.” It would be easy to conclude that the art world is unaware that it is committing suicide, but Solzhenitsyn goes on to say that art is not dead. “All who predict that art is disintegrating, that it has outgrown its forms, and that it is dying are wrong and will be wrong. We will die, but art will remain. Will we, before we go under, ever understand all its facets and all its ends?” He was convinced that a work of art “contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.”
We can only surmise what Solzhenitsyn thought of art like Hirst’s gallery installation, but he probably would have agreed with these remarks from Kuspit, “The moment of revelation occurs not when art and life are blurred, but when one becomes clear-eyed -- like Hirst’s cleaning man -- and realizes that what presents itself as art is just a leftover piece of life. One has awakened from a bad dream.”
Works Cited:
Carey, John, What Good are the Arts?. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Chesterton, G. K., What’s Wrong with the World. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956.
Danto, Arthur C., After the End of Art, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Hunter, Sam, John Jacobus and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art. New York: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004.
Kuspit, Donald, The End of Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Matheny, Lynn, “Edward Hopper.” American Art Review Oct. 2007: 166-73.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.
Tomkins, Calvin, and the Editors of Time Life Books, The World of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Time Inc., 1966
Williams, William Carlos, A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. Ed. Bram Dijkstra. New York: New Directions Books, 1978.
Wolfe, Tom, From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Pocket Books, 1981.
-----. The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Wolfe, Tom, and Milton Glaser. “In Conversation.” Graphis. FindArticles.com. (Jan/Feb 2001). 10 Oct 2008
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3992/is_200101/ai_n8934033
Every Painting Has A Trap
by Ron Zito
Every painting has a trap. You’re moving along beautifully. You seem to be in complete control, although you’re not thinking about it. The brush moves almost by magic. The colors are right and go to all the right places. The painting is clean and fresh, with no fussing and mussing. You’re conscious of what’s happening, but not too conscious. It is a beautiful, miraculous time.
But making a painting is like going to war with the gods. You make all the right moves. You feel confident and unaware. They’re on your side, but suddenly they fly off to some other painter.
You fall out of your wondrous zone for just one moment and you make the wrong brushstroke; or you mix the wrong color. You are forced to stop and correct the mistake and all your forward momentum is lost, probably for good. The wondrous time is over. The unconscious, childlike time is gone. The critical time is here. The thinking time is upon you.
The trap is laid and you must now extract yourself from it as quickly as possible. Your desire is to move forward again, but first you must fall backwards. Corrections take some thinking on your part. But once the thinking starts, can you put a stop to it? Can you extract yourself from the critical trap?
Maybe it is best to overlook the mistake and continue on your way. Don’t let it delay your journey. Do all your fixing and fussing at the end, where it will do less damage. Do not listen to your critical mind yet. It wants you to stop and think, the sooner the better. But if you stop too soon, how hard it will be to get going again.
It’s like writing free verse, or stream of consciousness. You just plow ahead and release on paper what ever comes to the forefront of your mind. You don’t stop for anything. Forget about correct punctuation and grammar for now. Get the words on the paper and worry about editing later.
Shouldn’t this also be the way we paint? Get the paint on the surface and worry about editing it later. You can’t let the left side of your brain dominate at this point. It has to be held back until its called upon for the all-important job of critic.
What are the results of such a painting method? Are you getting just sloppy mush? Is the painting losing its structure? If so, then you have discovered why it is so important to hone your skills. Like any other artist -- a musician, a writer, an actor -- you cannot stop to think about how to do it. The concert pianist doesn’t even refer to music when playing in the concert hall. Just try thinking about how to walk down a flight of stairs. It’s almost paralyzing. The most likely outcome is a tumble down the stairs.
Practice is the remedy for uncertainty. Practice gives you the confidence to lay down the paint and leave it alone, because it was done right. The skills you acquire by practicing your craft will give you the freedom to paint in the intuitive zone. Your creative momentum will not run into a cul-de-sac. Cultivate your skills and you will avoid the painting trap.
by Ron Zito
Every painting has a trap. You’re moving along beautifully. You seem to be in complete control, although you’re not thinking about it. The brush moves almost by magic. The colors are right and go to all the right places. The painting is clean and fresh, with no fussing and mussing. You’re conscious of what’s happening, but not too conscious. It is a beautiful, miraculous time.
But making a painting is like going to war with the gods. You make all the right moves. You feel confident and unaware. They’re on your side, but suddenly they fly off to some other painter.
You fall out of your wondrous zone for just one moment and you make the wrong brushstroke; or you mix the wrong color. You are forced to stop and correct the mistake and all your forward momentum is lost, probably for good. The wondrous time is over. The unconscious, childlike time is gone. The critical time is here. The thinking time is upon you.
The trap is laid and you must now extract yourself from it as quickly as possible. Your desire is to move forward again, but first you must fall backwards. Corrections take some thinking on your part. But once the thinking starts, can you put a stop to it? Can you extract yourself from the critical trap?
Maybe it is best to overlook the mistake and continue on your way. Don’t let it delay your journey. Do all your fixing and fussing at the end, where it will do less damage. Do not listen to your critical mind yet. It wants you to stop and think, the sooner the better. But if you stop too soon, how hard it will be to get going again.
It’s like writing free verse, or stream of consciousness. You just plow ahead and release on paper what ever comes to the forefront of your mind. You don’t stop for anything. Forget about correct punctuation and grammar for now. Get the words on the paper and worry about editing later.
Shouldn’t this also be the way we paint? Get the paint on the surface and worry about editing it later. You can’t let the left side of your brain dominate at this point. It has to be held back until its called upon for the all-important job of critic.
What are the results of such a painting method? Are you getting just sloppy mush? Is the painting losing its structure? If so, then you have discovered why it is so important to hone your skills. Like any other artist -- a musician, a writer, an actor -- you cannot stop to think about how to do it. The concert pianist doesn’t even refer to music when playing in the concert hall. Just try thinking about how to walk down a flight of stairs. It’s almost paralyzing. The most likely outcome is a tumble down the stairs.
Practice is the remedy for uncertainty. Practice gives you the confidence to lay down the paint and leave it alone, because it was done right. The skills you acquire by practicing your craft will give you the freedom to paint in the intuitive zone. Your creative momentum will not run into a cul-de-sac. Cultivate your skills and you will avoid the painting trap.
The Written Legacy of Vincent van Gogh
by Ron Zito
“For great things are not done just by impulse, but are a series of small things put together.”
Part 2: Hard Work
Surely every aspiring artist must come to a point in his life when he thinks: “I want to be an artist, but do I have to put in such hard work to get there? Did all the great artists have to work so hard to become that good?” Well, there’s something to be said for natural-born talent, but, as Thomas Edison said, “genius is one-percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
One of the best examples of a painter developing into a great artist is Vincent van Gogh. Here is a man who through tremendous effort and persistence forced the world to take notice of him. No genius in the Mozartian sense, he worked unceasingly at painting. Whatever else there is to say about Van Gogh, and his letters provide a rich harvest for anyone interested in the life of an artist, he was an extremely hard worker.
Here he is in 1882 writing to his faithful correspondent, his brother Theo, about the hard physical nature of painting. And he is not ashamed to call it a “handicraft.”
“I feel there is nothing more solid than a ‘handicraft’ in the literal sense of working with your hands. If you became a painter, one of the things that would astonish you is that painting and everything connected with it is really hard work from a physical point of view; besides the mental stress, the worry of mind, it requires a rather great exertion of strength, and this day after day.”
The next time you’re out plein-air painting, just think of what it must have been like for Vincent, sometimes lugging his easel and paints for miles across the countryside, and sometimes on an empty stomach. But physical work is not foremost in his mind when he speaks of hard work. Here are some thoughts we can all identify with:
“It is splendid to look at something and admire it, to think about it and keep hold of it, and then to say, I am going to draw and work at it until I have fixed it on paper. Of course I do not mean to say I am so satisfied with my work that I think I need not do better still. But the way to do better later on is to work as well as one can today, then there will be progress tomorrow.”
And here again is his insistence on working at his craft, and also maintaining his sense of independence:
“Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and continuous observation. By persistent, I mean not only continuous work, but also not giving up your opinion at the bidding of such and such a person.”
Here is Van Gogh’s apt metaphor for the difficulties of drawing:
“What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding against it is of no use? One must undermine the wall and drill through it slowly and patiently, in my opinion.”
In 1884, Vincent had this good advice for anyone afraid to lay down that difficult first stroke.
“Just dash something down when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing that staring of a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can’t do anything. The canvas stares at you like an idiot, and it hypnotizes some painters, so that they themselves become idiots. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the really passionate painter who is daring -- and who has once and for all broken that spell of ‘you cannot.’”
When you are struggling with your own painting, don’t give into the siren-song of shortcuts to improvement. Look at the paintings of Van Gogh and notice how his early work was stiff and crude compared to the fresh and brilliant paintings that he deserves to be remembered for. He did not achieve success overnight, and, unfortunately for Vincent, he never knew how beloved his paintings were to become the world over. But don’t forget that even one of the greatest painters of all time had to struggle, and he conquered his shortcomings with hard work.
“For every week I now do something which I couldn’t do before, and as I have already mentioned, it is like growing young again.... this consciousness is what gives me courage for the future and helps me bear the many difficulties of the present”
by Ron Zito
“For great things are not done just by impulse, but are a series of small things put together.”
Part 2: Hard Work
Surely every aspiring artist must come to a point in his life when he thinks: “I want to be an artist, but do I have to put in such hard work to get there? Did all the great artists have to work so hard to become that good?” Well, there’s something to be said for natural-born talent, but, as Thomas Edison said, “genius is one-percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
One of the best examples of a painter developing into a great artist is Vincent van Gogh. Here is a man who through tremendous effort and persistence forced the world to take notice of him. No genius in the Mozartian sense, he worked unceasingly at painting. Whatever else there is to say about Van Gogh, and his letters provide a rich harvest for anyone interested in the life of an artist, he was an extremely hard worker.
Here he is in 1882 writing to his faithful correspondent, his brother Theo, about the hard physical nature of painting. And he is not ashamed to call it a “handicraft.”
“I feel there is nothing more solid than a ‘handicraft’ in the literal sense of working with your hands. If you became a painter, one of the things that would astonish you is that painting and everything connected with it is really hard work from a physical point of view; besides the mental stress, the worry of mind, it requires a rather great exertion of strength, and this day after day.”
The next time you’re out plein-air painting, just think of what it must have been like for Vincent, sometimes lugging his easel and paints for miles across the countryside, and sometimes on an empty stomach. But physical work is not foremost in his mind when he speaks of hard work. Here are some thoughts we can all identify with:
“It is splendid to look at something and admire it, to think about it and keep hold of it, and then to say, I am going to draw and work at it until I have fixed it on paper. Of course I do not mean to say I am so satisfied with my work that I think I need not do better still. But the way to do better later on is to work as well as one can today, then there will be progress tomorrow.”
And here again is his insistence on working at his craft, and also maintaining his sense of independence:
“Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and continuous observation. By persistent, I mean not only continuous work, but also not giving up your opinion at the bidding of such and such a person.”
Here is Van Gogh’s apt metaphor for the difficulties of drawing:
“What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall -- since pounding against it is of no use? One must undermine the wall and drill through it slowly and patiently, in my opinion.”
In 1884, Vincent had this good advice for anyone afraid to lay down that difficult first stroke.
“Just dash something down when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing that staring of a blank canvas is; it says to the painter, You can’t do anything. The canvas stares at you like an idiot, and it hypnotizes some painters, so that they themselves become idiots. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the really passionate painter who is daring -- and who has once and for all broken that spell of ‘you cannot.’”
When you are struggling with your own painting, don’t give into the siren-song of shortcuts to improvement. Look at the paintings of Van Gogh and notice how his early work was stiff and crude compared to the fresh and brilliant paintings that he deserves to be remembered for. He did not achieve success overnight, and, unfortunately for Vincent, he never knew how beloved his paintings were to become the world over. But don’t forget that even one of the greatest painters of all time had to struggle, and he conquered his shortcomings with hard work.
“For every week I now do something which I couldn’t do before, and as I have already mentioned, it is like growing young again.... this consciousness is what gives me courage for the future and helps me bear the many difficulties of the present”
The Written Legacy of Vincent van Gogh
by Ron Zito
“Strolling on wharves and in alleys and streets and in the houses, waiting rooms, even saloons, is not a pleasant pastime, except for an artist.”
Part 3: Plein Air Penance
What artist wouldn’t give up the convenience of a studio if, when painting outdoors, they could somehow be protected from the weather and insects. Oh, and wouldn’t it be nice if the sun and clouds would stop in their tracks for a few hours! Anyone who has ever had their easel blow over in a storm, or noticed their fingers growing numb in the cold, has asked themselves, “Why do I bother doing this? It would be so much easier to paint indoors.” For us there is always the option of staying indoors and using our photographs, limiting as that may be. But for a painter like Vincent van Gogh, there was no alternative to painting outdoors. A landscape painter at the end of the nineteenth century had to brave the elements to find and paint his subject matter.
Wandering all over the rainy lowlands and cities of his native Netherlands, or in the sunnier fields of Provence, Van Gogh was one of the most dedicated plein air painters of all time. In his letters he describes his never-ending quest to capture nature on his canvas. Considering the difficulties he faced in doing so, it is a wonder that his paintings have such a joyous spirit about them. Just the physical demands of carrying his heavy equipment for miles through the countryside would be daunting enough for most of us. Here in a letter to his brother Theo he describes other problems that he had to deal with.
“But just go and paint out-of doors on the spot itself! then all kinds of things happen; for instance, I had to wipe off at least a hundred or more flies from the four paintings you will receive, not counting the dust and sand, not counting that when one carries them across the heath and through the hedges for several hours, some thorns will scratch them, etc.”
As if flies and thorns weren’t enough, here he is in the South of France enduring other difficulties, but making the best of it.
“The fascination that these huge plains have for me is very strong, so that I felt no weariness, in spite of the really wearisome circumstances, mistral and mosquitos. If a view makes you forget these little annoyances, it must have something in it. . . . What a picture I would make of it if there was not this damn wind. That is the maddening thing here, no matter where you set up your easel. And that is largely why the painted studies are not so finished as the drawings; the canvas is shaking all the time.”
Wind is a common problem for all plein air painters, and it certainly was no different for Van Gogh. Here he is fighting it again on the Dutch coast.
“I brought two small marines home from there. One of them is slightly sprinkled with sand -- but the second, made during a real storm, during which the sea came quite close to the dunes, was so covered with a thick layer of sand that I was obliged to scrape it off twice. The wind blew so hard that I could hardly stay on my feet, and could hardly see for the sand that was flying around. However, I tried to get it fixed by going to a little inn behind the dunes, and there scraped it off and immediately painted it in again, returning to the beach now and then for a fresh impression.”
I dare say that Van Gogh certainly showed more grit (sorry!) than I would ever have shown under those circumstances. All of us pastel painters would much rather have the sand underneath our paintings.
I wonder if Van Gogh sometimes welcomed the flies, mosquitos, and wind as company. Writing to Theo again from Provence he says, “Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for dinner or coffee. And it has been like that from the beginning. But up to now the loneliness has not worried me much because I have found the brighter sun and its effect on nature so absorbing.”
Loneliness was not always a problem for him. Sometimes he would have much preferred some solitude. Here he is amidst the hustle and bustle of The Hague.
“You cannot imagine how irritating and tiring it is when people always stand so close to you. Sometimes it makes me so nervous that I have to give up. So yesterday morning, though it was still very early and I had hoped to be left alone, a study of the chestnut trees in the Bezuidenthout (which are so splendid) turned out all wrong for this reason. And people are sometimes so rude and impertinent.”
I would bet money that the following incident has never happened to any of us. Talk about mixed media!
“. . . it may serve as an example of The Hague public’s politeness toward painters that suddenly a fellow from behind me, or probably from a window, spat his quid of tobacco onto my paper.” I wonder if tobacco juice is archival?
Somehow, the frequently irritable Vincent takes it all in stride:
“. . . those people are not bad, they do not understand anything about it, and probably think I am a lunatic when they see me making a drawing with large hooks and crooks which don’t mean anything to them. . . . Yesterday, for instance, I heard someone behind me say, ‘That’s a queer sort of painter -- he draws the horse’s ass instead of drawing from the front.’ I rather liked that comment.”
by Ron Zito
“Strolling on wharves and in alleys and streets and in the houses, waiting rooms, even saloons, is not a pleasant pastime, except for an artist.”
Part 3: Plein Air Penance
What artist wouldn’t give up the convenience of a studio if, when painting outdoors, they could somehow be protected from the weather and insects. Oh, and wouldn’t it be nice if the sun and clouds would stop in their tracks for a few hours! Anyone who has ever had their easel blow over in a storm, or noticed their fingers growing numb in the cold, has asked themselves, “Why do I bother doing this? It would be so much easier to paint indoors.” For us there is always the option of staying indoors and using our photographs, limiting as that may be. But for a painter like Vincent van Gogh, there was no alternative to painting outdoors. A landscape painter at the end of the nineteenth century had to brave the elements to find and paint his subject matter.
Wandering all over the rainy lowlands and cities of his native Netherlands, or in the sunnier fields of Provence, Van Gogh was one of the most dedicated plein air painters of all time. In his letters he describes his never-ending quest to capture nature on his canvas. Considering the difficulties he faced in doing so, it is a wonder that his paintings have such a joyous spirit about them. Just the physical demands of carrying his heavy equipment for miles through the countryside would be daunting enough for most of us. Here in a letter to his brother Theo he describes other problems that he had to deal with.
“But just go and paint out-of doors on the spot itself! then all kinds of things happen; for instance, I had to wipe off at least a hundred or more flies from the four paintings you will receive, not counting the dust and sand, not counting that when one carries them across the heath and through the hedges for several hours, some thorns will scratch them, etc.”
As if flies and thorns weren’t enough, here he is in the South of France enduring other difficulties, but making the best of it.
“The fascination that these huge plains have for me is very strong, so that I felt no weariness, in spite of the really wearisome circumstances, mistral and mosquitos. If a view makes you forget these little annoyances, it must have something in it. . . . What a picture I would make of it if there was not this damn wind. That is the maddening thing here, no matter where you set up your easel. And that is largely why the painted studies are not so finished as the drawings; the canvas is shaking all the time.”
Wind is a common problem for all plein air painters, and it certainly was no different for Van Gogh. Here he is fighting it again on the Dutch coast.
“I brought two small marines home from there. One of them is slightly sprinkled with sand -- but the second, made during a real storm, during which the sea came quite close to the dunes, was so covered with a thick layer of sand that I was obliged to scrape it off twice. The wind blew so hard that I could hardly stay on my feet, and could hardly see for the sand that was flying around. However, I tried to get it fixed by going to a little inn behind the dunes, and there scraped it off and immediately painted it in again, returning to the beach now and then for a fresh impression.”
I dare say that Van Gogh certainly showed more grit (sorry!) than I would ever have shown under those circumstances. All of us pastel painters would much rather have the sand underneath our paintings.
I wonder if Van Gogh sometimes welcomed the flies, mosquitos, and wind as company. Writing to Theo again from Provence he says, “Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone, except to ask for dinner or coffee. And it has been like that from the beginning. But up to now the loneliness has not worried me much because I have found the brighter sun and its effect on nature so absorbing.”
Loneliness was not always a problem for him. Sometimes he would have much preferred some solitude. Here he is amidst the hustle and bustle of The Hague.
“You cannot imagine how irritating and tiring it is when people always stand so close to you. Sometimes it makes me so nervous that I have to give up. So yesterday morning, though it was still very early and I had hoped to be left alone, a study of the chestnut trees in the Bezuidenthout (which are so splendid) turned out all wrong for this reason. And people are sometimes so rude and impertinent.”
I would bet money that the following incident has never happened to any of us. Talk about mixed media!
“. . . it may serve as an example of The Hague public’s politeness toward painters that suddenly a fellow from behind me, or probably from a window, spat his quid of tobacco onto my paper.” I wonder if tobacco juice is archival?
Somehow, the frequently irritable Vincent takes it all in stride:
“. . . those people are not bad, they do not understand anything about it, and probably think I am a lunatic when they see me making a drawing with large hooks and crooks which don’t mean anything to them. . . . Yesterday, for instance, I heard someone behind me say, ‘That’s a queer sort of painter -- he draws the horse’s ass instead of drawing from the front.’ I rather liked that comment.”
Painting from Photographs
by Ron Zito
(These remarks are also meant to assist all painters, whether or not you use photographs.)
Is it wrong to paint from photographs? To hear some people talk, you would think that any artist who resorted to the help of a camera was committing a major violation of the Artist’s Code of Ethics. You remember the day you laid your right hand on your palette and swore never to paint from a photo, don’t you? Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that just about every artist out there is violating the code. But we’ll keep it quiet.
There is nothing wrong with painting from photos. Why would you not take advantage of such a useful aid. You should use every tool you can master to make yourself a better painter. I take advantage of painting outdoors whenever I can, and I enjoy and benefit from it, but let’s face it, outdoor painting is a luxury for most of us, especially in the winter months. While some people will only paint en plein air, or from studies they have done in the field, I consider a photo to be equally as valuable, if used properly. (Still life is another subject altogether. I see no reason to paint still life from photos, when you can set up your own arrangement in the studio and control the lighting. Paint these from life.) Most of the time good photos can be a perfectly good substitute for field sketches. In fact, to the observant artist they can even act as a field study. Compositionally, a camera gives you an advantage, since you are able to frame the picture you want to paint and leave out all the extraneous distracting information. They are also good at clearly distinguishing contrast.
You do need to keep reminding yourself that a camera does not see as well as that blessed gift, the human eye. Therefore, colors might not be as vivid as you remember them. Shadowed areas might be too dark, or sun-bathed areas washed out. Most of the time I paint from photos that are lacking the intense colors that I remember seeing when I took them, but I visualize in my mind's eye what attracted me to the scene. Use your memory!
Also, remember that you don’t want to make an exact copy of the photo anyway. If you’re going to do that, why not just become a photographer. When you paint the scene, make it better. Personalize it. You might want to add visual interest by changing some of the colors, or you could add or remove certain elements of the picture. If you have several photos of the same scene, look them over. You may be able to take advantage of characteristics from all of them. Just use photography as a visual aid.
When starting out, make sure to carefully examine the photo you'll be using. If you look at it under good light, you will see more of interest than you originally thought. I am often surprised at how much color there really is in a photograph when I examine it more closely. Be alert to those little bits of color that can spark interest in a painting.
What is it about this particular scene that attracted you in the first place? Even a poor photo can have something in it that can speak to you. It’s up to you to draw out its potential. Find the main area or areas of interest. Focus in on them and determine what makes them so emotionally provocative. You want to be able to capture that emotion in color and values. Remember that you'll probably have to "push" the color a little to make up for some lack of information. Don't worry if you go too far; you can always back off later on.
The center of attention is crucial to creating a good painting. The rest of the scene is important, but only as supporting characters. Don't take away from the emotional center of the work by letting the supporting cast upstage the lead roles. Sometimes this means simplifying the composition or diminishing some of the details or color. Don't let the photo dictate to you what you will paint; change it to make it a better painting.
After making a few preliminary marks on your canvas or paper to indicate key compositional elements, start laying in color in all of the major areas of the picture. This is usually the most exciting part of a painting. At this point you should just relax and enjoy the act of putting down large color shapes. It should be accomplished quickly, with no fussiness. If you are using a brush, make your brushstrokes interesting. Of course, you should try to make your shapes accurate, but do not get carried away with details. You'll have plenty of time to fret over them later!
Values are the important thing right now. Fill in as much color as possible, in all areas of the picture. Step back from your easel often to check your lights and darks. Every time you add a color, it affects other colors, so don't concentrate on only one area of the painting. In the beginning, get as much coverage as possible so you can see if you are on the right track. Keep checking your progress. Do not remain glued to your easel! View from a distance. Squint at your painting to check your values, then make any necessary corrections.
I believe there are natural stages to the creation of a painting. Once you feel you have covered your canvas or paper with all the important color shapes, you have really reached the end of stage one. You have created a foundation. What you have done should look more like an abstract painting at this point. In fact you may want to explore the possibility of turning it into an abstract painting! Or if you feel you have already created an interesting image, you may want to dispose of the photograph altogether and rely on your imagination to complete the painting. Why not be open to the possibilities that arise from the act of creation! The ability to recognize an opportunity and adapt to the situation can make you a better artist.
At this juncture some refining needs to be done. You need to firm up all those nice areas of color that you laid down. In the end, you don't want to have a painting that is all soft and blurry. At the same time, you don't want everything to appear sharply in focus. This just confuses the eye by not allowing it to rest anywhere. Just as in life, we need to have strength and weakness, hardness and softness in the appropriate places. There is that same give and take in a painting. You can bring this about by the use of hard and lost edges. Find those areas of the painting that need to stand off on their own and make sure that you have set them apart with hard edges. Do not blend everything together. Create contrast by careful examination of the scene. Look for these hard and soft edges in your photo.
Also ask yourself: have you gotten your colors right? Not only can you create contrast with values, but also with color. Even if you decide to change the colors and not use the same ones from the photo, they should not clash. Some colors go together and some do not. Complimentary colors are invaluable in creating interest in a painting. But remember to use color effectively. Don’t let it demand attention all over the place. Use it to lead the viewer to your center of interest.
Details, details. I think for most of us this is where the real work begins. The analytical part of your brain kicks in. It can make or break a painting, depending on how well you accomplish it. That tree branch could end up looking like a snake, or that window could turn into a black hole. Wouldn’t it be more fun to leave it the way it is, without the details? That’s a good question. Maybe you should leave it the way it is. Maybe you’ve already got a good painting, and details will only wreck it. If you’ve created an emotional image that really appeals to you, it might be worth it to set it aside and start a new painting. Sitting there in your studio it will talk to you. It may say, “Where’s the rest of me?” or “Don’t touch me, I’m beautiful!” If it still needs some work, you will know it, but if it doesn’t, then STOP, resist the temptation to take a bite from that apple.
This is not easy to do. It’s hard to be objective at this point. You feel that you can always improve that painting with one more stroke. What a mistake; and you will know it as soon as you do it. Train yourself to recognize something that works, and resist changing it. Once you’ve changed that color or brushstroke, it’s very difficult to get it back.
At this point most paintings do need some extra work. This is where the use of a photograph can be very beneficial. Compared to painting on location, a photo will yield far less detail. The key is to identify what needs to be done. Maybe all it needs is a few highlights, or a darkening of that shadow. Proceed with caution. Go slow and continually check your work by backing away from your easel. Don’t overdue it. A little bit goes a long way. Don’t overpower your painting with details. It’s better to suggest things and leave it up to the viewer to fill in the rest.
So there you are with your completed painting. You’ve invested time and effort into its creation. What if tomorrow morning you go to your studio and you’re immediately struck with how humdrum it is. (It’s amazing how much more clear-headed you are the morning after.) Do you try to fix it? Maybe it’s fixable, but chances are it’s not. It’s a scraper. Don’t lament. Try to figure out what went wrong and learn from it. Painting is a difficult job, combining so many different skills, both mental and physical. And then there’s that intangible thing called the heart. Put your heart into your painting and you will not be disappointed, no matter what the outcome. As important as results are, it’s the doing that is more important.
by Ron Zito
(These remarks are also meant to assist all painters, whether or not you use photographs.)
Is it wrong to paint from photographs? To hear some people talk, you would think that any artist who resorted to the help of a camera was committing a major violation of the Artist’s Code of Ethics. You remember the day you laid your right hand on your palette and swore never to paint from a photo, don’t you? Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that just about every artist out there is violating the code. But we’ll keep it quiet.
There is nothing wrong with painting from photos. Why would you not take advantage of such a useful aid. You should use every tool you can master to make yourself a better painter. I take advantage of painting outdoors whenever I can, and I enjoy and benefit from it, but let’s face it, outdoor painting is a luxury for most of us, especially in the winter months. While some people will only paint en plein air, or from studies they have done in the field, I consider a photo to be equally as valuable, if used properly. (Still life is another subject altogether. I see no reason to paint still life from photos, when you can set up your own arrangement in the studio and control the lighting. Paint these from life.) Most of the time good photos can be a perfectly good substitute for field sketches. In fact, to the observant artist they can even act as a field study. Compositionally, a camera gives you an advantage, since you are able to frame the picture you want to paint and leave out all the extraneous distracting information. They are also good at clearly distinguishing contrast.
You do need to keep reminding yourself that a camera does not see as well as that blessed gift, the human eye. Therefore, colors might not be as vivid as you remember them. Shadowed areas might be too dark, or sun-bathed areas washed out. Most of the time I paint from photos that are lacking the intense colors that I remember seeing when I took them, but I visualize in my mind's eye what attracted me to the scene. Use your memory!
Also, remember that you don’t want to make an exact copy of the photo anyway. If you’re going to do that, why not just become a photographer. When you paint the scene, make it better. Personalize it. You might want to add visual interest by changing some of the colors, or you could add or remove certain elements of the picture. If you have several photos of the same scene, look them over. You may be able to take advantage of characteristics from all of them. Just use photography as a visual aid.
When starting out, make sure to carefully examine the photo you'll be using. If you look at it under good light, you will see more of interest than you originally thought. I am often surprised at how much color there really is in a photograph when I examine it more closely. Be alert to those little bits of color that can spark interest in a painting.
What is it about this particular scene that attracted you in the first place? Even a poor photo can have something in it that can speak to you. It’s up to you to draw out its potential. Find the main area or areas of interest. Focus in on them and determine what makes them so emotionally provocative. You want to be able to capture that emotion in color and values. Remember that you'll probably have to "push" the color a little to make up for some lack of information. Don't worry if you go too far; you can always back off later on.
The center of attention is crucial to creating a good painting. The rest of the scene is important, but only as supporting characters. Don't take away from the emotional center of the work by letting the supporting cast upstage the lead roles. Sometimes this means simplifying the composition or diminishing some of the details or color. Don't let the photo dictate to you what you will paint; change it to make it a better painting.
After making a few preliminary marks on your canvas or paper to indicate key compositional elements, start laying in color in all of the major areas of the picture. This is usually the most exciting part of a painting. At this point you should just relax and enjoy the act of putting down large color shapes. It should be accomplished quickly, with no fussiness. If you are using a brush, make your brushstrokes interesting. Of course, you should try to make your shapes accurate, but do not get carried away with details. You'll have plenty of time to fret over them later!
Values are the important thing right now. Fill in as much color as possible, in all areas of the picture. Step back from your easel often to check your lights and darks. Every time you add a color, it affects other colors, so don't concentrate on only one area of the painting. In the beginning, get as much coverage as possible so you can see if you are on the right track. Keep checking your progress. Do not remain glued to your easel! View from a distance. Squint at your painting to check your values, then make any necessary corrections.
I believe there are natural stages to the creation of a painting. Once you feel you have covered your canvas or paper with all the important color shapes, you have really reached the end of stage one. You have created a foundation. What you have done should look more like an abstract painting at this point. In fact you may want to explore the possibility of turning it into an abstract painting! Or if you feel you have already created an interesting image, you may want to dispose of the photograph altogether and rely on your imagination to complete the painting. Why not be open to the possibilities that arise from the act of creation! The ability to recognize an opportunity and adapt to the situation can make you a better artist.
At this juncture some refining needs to be done. You need to firm up all those nice areas of color that you laid down. In the end, you don't want to have a painting that is all soft and blurry. At the same time, you don't want everything to appear sharply in focus. This just confuses the eye by not allowing it to rest anywhere. Just as in life, we need to have strength and weakness, hardness and softness in the appropriate places. There is that same give and take in a painting. You can bring this about by the use of hard and lost edges. Find those areas of the painting that need to stand off on their own and make sure that you have set them apart with hard edges. Do not blend everything together. Create contrast by careful examination of the scene. Look for these hard and soft edges in your photo.
Also ask yourself: have you gotten your colors right? Not only can you create contrast with values, but also with color. Even if you decide to change the colors and not use the same ones from the photo, they should not clash. Some colors go together and some do not. Complimentary colors are invaluable in creating interest in a painting. But remember to use color effectively. Don’t let it demand attention all over the place. Use it to lead the viewer to your center of interest.
Details, details. I think for most of us this is where the real work begins. The analytical part of your brain kicks in. It can make or break a painting, depending on how well you accomplish it. That tree branch could end up looking like a snake, or that window could turn into a black hole. Wouldn’t it be more fun to leave it the way it is, without the details? That’s a good question. Maybe you should leave it the way it is. Maybe you’ve already got a good painting, and details will only wreck it. If you’ve created an emotional image that really appeals to you, it might be worth it to set it aside and start a new painting. Sitting there in your studio it will talk to you. It may say, “Where’s the rest of me?” or “Don’t touch me, I’m beautiful!” If it still needs some work, you will know it, but if it doesn’t, then STOP, resist the temptation to take a bite from that apple.
This is not easy to do. It’s hard to be objective at this point. You feel that you can always improve that painting with one more stroke. What a mistake; and you will know it as soon as you do it. Train yourself to recognize something that works, and resist changing it. Once you’ve changed that color or brushstroke, it’s very difficult to get it back.
At this point most paintings do need some extra work. This is where the use of a photograph can be very beneficial. Compared to painting on location, a photo will yield far less detail. The key is to identify what needs to be done. Maybe all it needs is a few highlights, or a darkening of that shadow. Proceed with caution. Go slow and continually check your work by backing away from your easel. Don’t overdue it. A little bit goes a long way. Don’t overpower your painting with details. It’s better to suggest things and leave it up to the viewer to fill in the rest.
So there you are with your completed painting. You’ve invested time and effort into its creation. What if tomorrow morning you go to your studio and you’re immediately struck with how humdrum it is. (It’s amazing how much more clear-headed you are the morning after.) Do you try to fix it? Maybe it’s fixable, but chances are it’s not. It’s a scraper. Don’t lament. Try to figure out what went wrong and learn from it. Painting is a difficult job, combining so many different skills, both mental and physical. And then there’s that intangible thing called the heart. Put your heart into your painting and you will not be disappointed, no matter what the outcome. As important as results are, it’s the doing that is more important.