-oil-on-linen-mounted-on-board-7.jpeg)
Quotation of the Week
It is no easy matter to give novelty to old subjects, authority to new, to impart lustre to rusty things, light to the obscure and mysterious, to throw a charm over what is distasteful, to command credence for doubtful matters, to give nature to everything, and to arrange everything in accordance with Its nature.
— Pliny the Elder
— Pliny the Elder
Ruth Miller's Atmosphere of Thought
By Kim Sloane
“I would prefer to claim with Pissarro that the art of painting, for those who know how to use their eyes, resides in an apple on the corner of a table. What could be more stupid than painting an apple! And yet to make of such a simple fact something that will be elevated to beauty, painting will have to engage all of its means; it will have to be solid, flexible, and rich in substance, suggestive too, so suggestive that it will have the luxury, the grandeur of revealing man’s presence in the apple — the apple surrounded with an atmosphere of thought.”
If we substitute cabbage, gourd or pumpkin for apple, this quote of Odilon Redon perfectly suits and describes the achievement of the paintings of Ruth Miller on view (October 12-November 12, 2011) at Lohin Geduld Gallery. Few painters of our time could renew the sentiment of these words and convince us of their continual relevance. Miller is an artist who clearly knows how to use her eyes. Her vision has been honed by over sixty years of working from nature, studying the work of the past, and in communion with the best artists of the New York School. She is an exceptional draftsperson, as demonstrated by the drawings in the exhibition. 
The paintings display a mastery of color as well, and the ability to combine and structure pictures through both drawing and color. The key words in Redon’s quote are elevate and suggestive. The elevation in Miller’s painting is achieved through this structuring. She is a constructor, a term used by Cezanne to describe Michelangelo. She builds with pieces of paint that are responses to her subject and to each other. Color intervals are created which form both solidity and flexibility. The solidity is made by careful steps of tone, and a sure knowledge of how, when, and to what degree to shift value, hue and chroma.
A mason jar on a windowsill is made by three tones, perfectly pitched, yellow to orange ochre, which magically conveys both the substance and translucency of its contents (the tones are nearly identical to those used by Turner in the center his Slave Ship, which also create a liquid, luminous transparency). Grandeur is given to both eggplant and pepper through the steps of broken color that lead to a grace note of high chromatic intensity. The flexibility comes through the same means. Patches of paint allow color to detach from objects and form relations and rapports (Cezanne’s term) with objects and spaces throughout the picture. These relations originate as internal, but soon engender external or metaphorical readings. Herein lies the suggestiveness of these works. The intervals of color create passages, spaces both small and large that allow us to penetrate the material envelope of the objects. We are presented with the great orb of a cabbage, whose penetration releases constellations of color and light and creates its own mysterious solar system.
Likewise, a pumpkin is Jupiter in majesty, both the largest of planets and the king of the Roman gods. Surrounding it are the moons or minions, straining against the powerful gravitational force, the gourds pulls to the right, the half cantaloupe torques to the left, and suddenly the still life is not so still.
The tabletop is an arena, and Miller's connections to her counterparts of the New York school become apparent (note the vigorous charcoal drawing in the paint, as we see in de Kooning) as force and counterforce, tension and release give a precarious counterpoint to the seeming stability of the arrangement.
Considering both Pissarro and Redon is an informative way to see the trajectory of Miller’s career. Beginning with a kind of positivist belief in the power of observation and thoughtful ordering of vision, and moving, forgetting nothing of all the powerful lessons learned along the way, to the more suggestive and spiritual world of symbolism. This is the great achievement; we have the cabbage, and we have the cosmos as well. This is indeed is a poetic elevation and there is no question of an atmosphere of thought, deep thought, and also great feeling.
© Kim Sloane
“I would prefer to claim with Pissarro that the art of painting, for those who know how to use their eyes, resides in an apple on the corner of a table. What could be more stupid than painting an apple! And yet to make of such a simple fact something that will be elevated to beauty, painting will have to engage all of its means; it will have to be solid, flexible, and rich in substance, suggestive too, so suggestive that it will have the luxury, the grandeur of revealing man’s presence in the apple — the apple surrounded with an atmosphere of thought.”
From "To Myself," Odilon Redon
The paintings display a mastery of color as well, and the ability to combine and structure pictures through both drawing and color. The key words in Redon’s quote are elevate and suggestive. The elevation in Miller’s painting is achieved through this structuring. She is a constructor, a term used by Cezanne to describe Michelangelo. She builds with pieces of paint that are responses to her subject and to each other. Color intervals are created which form both solidity and flexibility. The solidity is made by careful steps of tone, and a sure knowledge of how, when, and to what degree to shift value, hue and chroma.
A mason jar on a windowsill is made by three tones, perfectly pitched, yellow to orange ochre, which magically conveys both the substance and translucency of its contents (the tones are nearly identical to those used by Turner in the center his Slave Ship, which also create a liquid, luminous transparency). Grandeur is given to both eggplant and pepper through the steps of broken color that lead to a grace note of high chromatic intensity. The flexibility comes through the same means. Patches of paint allow color to detach from objects and form relations and rapports (Cezanne’s term) with objects and spaces throughout the picture. These relations originate as internal, but soon engender external or metaphorical readings. Herein lies the suggestiveness of these works. The intervals of color create passages, spaces both small and large that allow us to penetrate the material envelope of the objects. We are presented with the great orb of a cabbage, whose penetration releases constellations of color and light and creates its own mysterious solar system.
Likewise, a pumpkin is Jupiter in majesty, both the largest of planets and the king of the Roman gods. Surrounding it are the moons or minions, straining against the powerful gravitational force, the gourds pulls to the right, the half cantaloupe torques to the left, and suddenly the still life is not so still.
© Kim Sloane
November 2011
Kim Sloane is a painter who teaches at Pratt Institute.
www.kimsloane.com
Some Still Life Paintings
Paintings by Temma Bell, Stanley Bielen, Georges Braque, Lisa Breslow, Joan Brown, Paul Cezanne, Anne Vallayer-Coster, Robert Dukes, Phyllis Floyd, Josephine Halvorson, Israel Hershberg, Chelsea James, Rebecca Kallem, Tim Kennedy, Ken Kewley, Karl Knaths, Sydney Licht, Dik F. Liu, Sangram Majumdar, Eve Mansdorf, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Ruth Miller, Piet Mondrian, Walter Murch, William Nicholson, George Nick, Andy Pankhurst, Raphaelle Peale, John F. Peto, Susannah Phillips, Fausto Pirandello, Harold Reddicliffe, Celia Reisman, Mark Rothko, Barnet Rubenstein, E. M. Saniga, Yael Scalia, Helene Schjerfbeck, Evan Tyler Stallone, Kimberly Cole Trowbridge, Euan Uglow, Peter Van Dyck, Susan Jane Walp
GRID VIEW WITH ARTIST NAMES
GEORGE NICK: THE WORLD IS FLAT
That is, in relationship to painting the world.
Mirror, Raven, Rose, Lemon and I, 20" X 20", 2011
We are in constant motion and the motion seen with two eyes gives us information about our place in space and the relationships of forms within space. We have since babyhood developed a keen understanding of the world as form and space. We use this knowledge plus the flat world we see (if we don't move) to paint images.
What is the flat world we see? Monocular vision?
Even though we have two eyes, what we generally see is one clear object. Or think we do. Up close if we look with only our right eye we see the object and a background. If we close our right and look at the object at close range with our left eye, we see the object slightly moved and the background moved quite a bit. Because we are focusing on different parts of the site we do not notice this discrepancy. The mind makes it simple for us to see what we want to look at. Like peripheral vision. I remember Dickinson telling us that when we are studying an object to close one eye to see it clearer. And that is monocular vision.
The mind has made it easy for us to select our sight. We really see too much, so the mind has simplified our seeing. This knowledge is both personal and technical. We know a lot and we use that information unconsciously to make our way in the world.
Is there a way that this information interferes with our ability to see what is really there? Does making a painting involve an effort to put aside what we learned in infancy in order to see what is there?
Absolutely not! The information can only intrude if we think about it. We use all we know. We have an immense stored knowledge that involves personal history and technical knowledge capable of a high degree of analytical powers. In painting I try to find different ways to accomplish that.
Is this difficult? When in your painting life did you realize that there is a difference between pure perception and our understanding of the world? How did the awareness of this difference change, for you, the process of translating the seen to a painted image?
It is difficult to paint. It is pain and we add the T.
In the beginning, I always felt I couldn't remake the world but I would like to try. I didn't know how so I tried different ways. I am still doing that. I am not that focused. I go out to paint. I look for something to paint. All these ideas stay in the background, out of sight, until I am through painting. I get ideas from the act of painting and it guides me either into a dogma or chaos. All my paintings start from what is seen. The painting marries in different ways and set up its own laws, which I try to deduce and follow. The awareness did not change the painting. The conclusions of the finished piece changed the process of translating the seen.
I have used the same tools for 50 years. The method is not mechanical. It has more to do with dreams, desires and pot luck. Since there is no method, the results vary by how aggressive or focused they are. Since the paintings differ, there are surprises, because the search — once begun and noted — must be followed, and a painting takes on its own life in the process.
Sitting on our deck looking at the back yard I see the cherry tree I planted 30 years ago and cut down after I wrote this. While thinking about The Flat World, it occurred to me that looking at this tree might serve as an example of some of the ideas pertaining to my personal knowledge, feelings and understanding of form and space. I was watching birds chirping and flitting in and out of the tree (which had the width and volume of a previously owned VW Vanagon). It was about 40 feet from where I sat (which was twice the length of our raised vegetable garden). I saw through the branches some birds flying to a purple beech tree that I had planted 16 years ago and that reached a height of 17 feet (the width of my old studio). I could have constructed an accurate sculpture of all these forms and space.This was personal, immediate knowledge.
There is a generic knowledge of all trees that I gained as a child when I walked around them, looked up, felt them, climbed them, felt their texture and solidity. I vaguely understood all trees from the few that we had in the yard.
We know much more than trees. Our extensive knowledge of the world is almost infinite. How we choose to select and when we choose to select from this huge bank varies depending on our quiet momentary needs and desires. But this information is selectively used in painting though we are not conscious of doing it. We think directly in terms of our practical tools with which we are making true images on a flat surface with color and tone.
I try to be objective in what I see but the sight is adulterated by how much I know. I squint to simplify what I see and to gauge value. I try in that way to be more objective and not think of art so that I can get closer to myself within the framework of my learned skills, habits, capabilities and desires.
We know much more than trees. Our extensive knowledge of the world is almost infinite. How we choose to select and when we choose to select from this huge bank varies depending on our quiet momentary needs and desires. But this information is selectively used in painting though we are not conscious of doing it. We think directly in terms of our practical tools with which we are making true images on a flat surface with color and tone.
I try to be objective in what I see but the sight is adulterated by how much I know. I squint to simplify what I see and to gauge value. I try in that way to be more objective and not think of art so that I can get closer to myself within the framework of my learned skills, habits, capabilities and desires.
Some Figure Paintings
Paintings by Kimberlee Alemian, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Andre Derain, John Dubrow, Phyllis Floyd, Lucian Freud, Ann Gale, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Charles Hawthorne, Chelsea James, Alex Kanevsky, Tim Kennedy, Ken Kewley, Kurt Knoblesdorf, Lotte Laserstein, Susan Lichtman, Sangram Majumdar, Eve Mansdorf, Henri Matisse, Joe Morzuch, Andy Pankhurst, Fausto Pirandello, Nicole McCormick Santiago, Tai Shan Schierenberg, Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco, Euan Uglow, David Wooddell
Painters and their Palettes
Some painters were invited to describe their palettes and the way they organize them, as well as their preferences regarding brushes, paint brands and medium formulas. Their replies follow.
Paul Cezanne
The colors on Cezanne's palette, according to Emile Bernard:
Yellows:
brilliant yellow
naples yellow
chrome yellow
yellow ochre
raw sienna
Reds:
Vermilion
red ochre
burnt sienna
rose madder
carmine lake
burnt lake
Greens:
emerald green
viridian
green earth
Blues:
cobalt blue
ultramarine
prussian blue
peach black
lead white
Sangram Majumdar — Color and Paint
One of the first lessons regarding color I ever had was at RISD, in a two-dimensional design class with Gerald Immonen. The class, and his projects created a wonderful foundation that was steeped in acute observation as much as it was in understanding color systems. When I began working with oils, my color palette was based around a warm/cool combination of the primaries alongside green (Permanent Green Light and Viridian) and a couple neutrals (Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna). Also, early on I began working with ‘artist’s grade’ paints. After realizing the amount of filler and chalk that is mixed into student grade paints, there really wasn’t even a choice in the matter! However, as finances often shape a lot of our decisions, I quickly had to downgrade my palette, and so I decided to keep working with artist’s grade paints and edited my palette down to: Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow Light, and Ultramarine. This went on for about three years, until slowly I started reintroducing other colors back into the mix (this was in grad school). During this time I also began working indirectly, applying paint in various manners, so I introduced an entire range of transparent hues to parallel my working palette that was primarily opaque hues. So, some of the new colors were Indian Yellow, Terre Verte, Transparent Blue Oxide, and Transparent Yellow Oxide. Over the last ten years my working palette has changed dramatically a few times. The first was when I decided to leave my chromatic palette and switch to a hybrid of chromatic and neutral primaries/secondaries. The reason behind this was a shift in my subject matter (working more from life, and motifs that were more somber in nature). I was finding myself spending a lot of time ‘knocking down’ colors, especially cadmiums to arrive at mixtures that could be arrived at quicker.
Stuart Shils on Color and his Palette
Of most importance for me, regardless of what is on the palette, is that the color mood of the painting is not the result of what specific colors are put out, but of what the painter can do with those colors to create a color complexion in the painting. I use the same colors for night painting, day painting, painting in Italy, painting on the coast of Ireland, urban painting or rural painting — the idea being that the colors are like the tools in a stone mason's bag and it is the mason's job to use the tools to get the job done. Just because a landscape is green doesn't mean we don't have reds on the palette. Everything gets mixed with everything, the color is never even close to being right out of the tube, and the palette has to look like a battlefield, which it is. The warms and the cools, mixing it up in the middle, out of which comes color. But until the color is put down on the canvas there is still really no color. Color is something that cannot exist on the palette but only in juxtaposition in the painting itself.
Cezanne's Doubt
By Maurice Merleau-Ponty
It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred- fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, an attempt, an approach to painting. In September of 1906, at the age sixty-seven—one month before his death—he wrote: "I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive.... Now it seems I am better that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued? I am working from nature, and it seems to me I am making slow progress”.
Painting was his world and his mode of existence. He worked alone without students, without admiration from his family, without encouragement from the critics. He painted on the afternoon of the day his mother died. In 1870 he was painting at l'Estaque while the police were after him for dodging the draft. And still he had moments of doubt about this vocation.
Painting was his world and his mode of existence. He worked alone without students, without admiration from his family, without encouragement from the critics. He painted on the afternoon of the day his mother died. In 1870 he was painting at l'Estaque while the police were after him for dodging the draft. And still he had moments of doubt about this vocation.
Israel Hershberg: My Palette(s)
My palette, if I am to think of it only as a list of colors inside of tubes, has changed little over the past 40 or so years. Whether in the attenuated, saturated notes and temperatures found in much of the Northeastern US, or under the merciless and brutally denuding light that bears down on Israel’s long dry summers, or in that tempered and fragrant apricot tinged light that is Umbria or Tuscany - that palette has served me well. This same list of colors has survived significant shifts and turns over time, as my inclinations, temperament, and aspirations toward light, color and place took to new directions.
In earlier years while living mainly in the North East and mid-Atlantic regions of the US, it was a paradigm of Northern European light that held my interest most. I mean by that, the not overly-brown palettes of Vermeer and Velazquez; a more naturalistic variation of the high contrast effects of chiaroscuro and tenebroso, was to a great extent the palette out of which I aspired to paint.
The move to Jerusalem, with the region’s unrelenting light and over-the-top lux index started moving me toward another kind of paradigm. The intense and hazy light of the Mediterranean became for me a stimulus for a renewed engagement with the high keys of fresco: Pompeii, Villa Livia, Fra Angelico, Giotto, Piero, Masaccio, early Corot and Morandi, came to the forefront plane of my thinking as I began painting my way south. Of course, sharing a “lake” with Italy, a commute of three and a half hours from Israel, went a long way to realizing in concrete terms the shift toward this new paradigm.
When I was younger I hand-ground and tubed my paints with the exception of Cremnitz White. That paint was superior in every way to anything manufactured on an industrial scale. Though I am unable to do so now, I prefer using the so called “handmade” colors manufactured today on a small scale than the mass-produced variety.
The List:
Cremnitz White - Old Holland (only)
Lemon Yellow
Cadmium Yellow Medium
Indian Yellow - Michael Harding
Cadmium Orange Light
Cadmium Red Light
Alizarin Crimson
Burnt Siena
Raw Umber
Windsor Violet - Windsor & Newton
Provence Violet Bluish - Williamsburg
Cobalt BlueUltramarine Blue
Phthalocyanine Blue Lake - Michael Harding
Vert Aubusson - Lefranc & Bourgeois
Veronese Green - Lefranc & Bourgeois
Cadmium Green
Cadmium Green Light
Aria Umbra I, 2003 - 2005, Oil on linen, 119 x 250 cm,
Collection: Israel Museum, Jerusalem Israel
View more paintings by Israel Hershberg
My palette: E.M. Saniga
Still life palette
Here are pictures of two palettes I use. The smaller one with the paint built up that looks like a bunch of Giacometti figures is used in a little room in the house with a small north light for still life painting when I think I need intense light. The bigger one is the one I use in my studio where the light in more diffused and is about two years old so the paint hasn’t built up yet.. I clean the palette after I paint but I don’t remove the colors from the edges and it builds up over time. The palettes look cool grey in terms of color but are actually warm grey of a middle value-the cool north light is on them in the pictures.
Studio palette
Laying out a palette in words is more complex than laying one out in paint because I have to think about things as compared to when I am painting; there I am just sort of reacting to what is in front of me or in my mind. But here is a try anyway.Most of my paint is Winsor and Newton because I have become used to the particular hues over many years, especially yellow ochre and raw umber, which seem to have more variation between producers. I always seem to have yellow ochre, naples yellow, cadmium orange, ivory black, raw umber, raw sienna, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, cadmium red, alizarin crimson and English red light, which is made by various manufacturers and which I prefer as my general flesh red. Burnt umber, cerulean blue, cobalt blue, manganese blue, and cadmium yellow light are nearby but not always laid out on the palette. I also will use some of the Williamsburg colors of various shades at times but evidently not too often as a tube lasts for years.
I have used Cremnitz white exclusively. I like Old Holland and Winsor Newton equally in that white.
Also nearby are some tubes of old paint that the painter Charles X. Carlson gave me. He died in 1990 and most are very old. Many don’t have labels and there are some odd reds and yellows that I don’t recognize but use at times. I also have some of the pigments that Charlie got from the printmaker Luigi Rist and I will use them at times. None are marked as to their official color and they seem to be different than the hues I usually use.
Finally, I have a number of pigments I bought at the Sennelier shop in Paris with the green storefront that is across the Seine from the Louvre. Most are earth pigments with funny names. What a place! Ghosts of everyone from Manet to Picasso and Matisse are there.
Other: Inside and Out
Gulgun Aliriza, Anna Ancher, Meir Appelfeld, Giovanni Bellini, Lisa Breslow, Christopher Chippendale, Meredith Fife Day, Lois Dodd, Tina Engels, Yuval Etzioni, Phyllis Floyd, Elana Hagler, Rebecca Harp, Israel Hershberg, Diana Horowitz, Chelsea James, Rebecca Kallem, Alex Kanevsky, Ken Kewley, Stanley Lewis, Susan Lichtman, Sangram Majumdar, Paul Manlove, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Henri Matisse, Nancy McCarthy, Ruth Miller, Piet Mondrian, George Nick, Stephanie Pierce, Carolyn Pyfrom, Celia Reisman, Yael Scalia, Claire Sherman, Helene Schjerfbeck, Stuart Shils, Telemaco Signorini, Harry Stooshinoff, Peter Van Dyck
LINK TO GRID VIEW
Fluidity in Focus
on the occasion of his exhibit at Soprafina Gallery, December 2011
—Henri Matisse (1908)
*I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and the way I translate it.
Through their medium artists reconstitute and give permanent form to nature’s evanescence, to its very authenticity. Painting…is nature’s paradox: it gives form to that which, in its essence, is beyond permanence. … To accomplish this feat…is a painstaking task. … [It] requires going beyond convention, beyond training, beyond culture, back beyond language, to a state of naïve yet sustained scrutiny and inquiry...[to a] world of forgetting.
—Joel Isaacson (1994)
The paintings in this exhibit aim to translate the fugitive conditions of light and color as discovered through the act of painting. They result directly from my desire to find and reveal through the material language of paint that which is essential in what I see. As such, they extend a modernist tradition of perceptual inquiry and representation based upon the raw data of sight, an interpretation of appearances directly apprehended and reconstructed on the canvas in a preform of color patches, unmitigated by any predetermining identification of what those color patches represent.
This way of seeing and of making paintings traces its formal genesis to the Impressionists, through whose expressed aims and practices it gained its first “modern” foothold. As Monet said, famously: “Try to forget what objects you have before you — a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, ‘here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow’, and paint it just as it appears, the exact color and shape.”
As simple and schematic as Monet’s advice may sound today, his charge to “forget what you know,” to engage directly with visual sensations, and to translate those sensations to the canvas using an exacting “parallel” language of relational color patches, echoes through the work of a number of prominent twentieth-century painters (Cezanne, Vuillard, Edwin Dickinson, Fairfield Porter). The substance of Monet’s advice continues to resonate through the practices of some important painters working today, including those of my foremost teacher, George Nick, with whom I studied in the late 1980’s.
This way of painting is rooted in the immediacy of perception rather than in what the artist knows about his subject a priori. It is an approach to painting based in finding rather than in making, in perception rather than in preconception, and it can lead to an engagement with fundamental questions about perception itself, its representation, and the “true” or rightful expression of what one sees. What one sees, however, is — like the images in Plato’s Cave — an ever questionable proposition.
Being a perceptual painter means that I accept as a condition of painting that appearances are fundamentally unstable and relational, that “reality” is vulnerable to distortion both from without as well as from within. The flow of time itself, as measured by the changing conditions of light and color in a given motif before me, alters unceasingly the arrangements of sensations that present themselves at any given instant. So, too, do my perceptions of these things change from moment to moment. The paradox of an approach to painting that is wedded to a poetry of the present moment is that the present moment is always changing. How my paintings appear, as well as how they are made, arises largely from my experience working with these fluid, changeable circumstances, and striving to draw into focus the forms I pull out from such liquid conditions.
www.christopherchippendale.com
Giving the Mundane its Beautiful Due
By Imogen Sara Smith
“Nothing humiliates his brushes,” the Goncourt brothers wrote in 1867 of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the eighteenth-century master of still life. Their amazement betrays disdain for such mundane subjects as copper pots, a jar of olives, a brioche, a dead rabbit, a clay pipe, a plate of plums. But while Chardin transformed kitchen scenes into enchantingly harmonious compositions, he never lost the feel of the kitchen. Evoking what Norman Bryson calls “a low-plane reality of quiet duties and small satisfactions,” he created an art not humiliated but nourished by the mundane and the quotidian. The evolution of these words is telling. Mundane means the things of the monde, earthly rather than heavenly; quotidian means daily, as in panum nostrum quotidianum, our daily bread. Both terms have picked up connotations of not merely the commonplace and ordinary, but the banal, unimaginative, pedestrian, dull. Used this way, the words diminish everyday experiences and ordinary surroundings.
The Common Object
Link to grid view with artists' names
Prince Street Gallery — October 5-30 2010
MICA Meyerhoff Gallery — December 9, 2011-March 18, 2012
Zeuxis is a grassroots organization of painters formed in 1995 to explore the contemporary possibilites of the still life. For The Common Object, Zeuxis artists and their guests agreed to produce a still life incorporating an ordinary dishtowel. Their approaches to this humble tool of daily life demonstrate the many ways in which still life painters can, in the words ofJohn Updike, "give the mundane its beautiful due." The economic anxieties of our time may stimulate new ways of appreciating the basics. The dishtowel might be treated as an inanimate object — for its drapery folds, its pattern or use as a backdrop — or it might be examined for its versatility and usefulness. Still life is the art of noticing how the world looks, and The Common Object celebrates the wonders of the quotidian, through the open~minded perspectives of contemporary American artists.
Peninsula Fine Arts Center — April 3-July 11, 2010
101 Museum Drive
Newport News, Virginia
Prince Street Gallery — October 5-30 2010
530 West 25 Street
New York, New York
MICA Meyerhoff Gallery — December 9, 2011-March 18, 2012
Fox Building
1303 West Mount Royal Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland
Behind the Curtain:
Meaning and Representations of Cloth in Painting
By Richard Baker
I think of painting as mildly calcified theater — all the “action,” so to speak, moves at the rate of a slow moving liquid, like glass.To paraphrase something Myron Stout wrote in 1953, — in the process of painting, each successive moment is a list of moments spread out in time while the painting progresses — they are gathered together at the end and become a single immutable moment. At the theater, when the curtain closes, the series of events now ended become an object-like memory composed of a myriad of moments. I have chosen a handful of images that depict cloth in painting. I hope they will illustrate my speculations about the metaphorical potential of such images as seen in still life paintings.
This painting is by Edward Hopper, painted in 1927. It was once common when going to the cinema that the screen would be concealed behind a curtain. This served to heighten a sense of anticipation and expectation. Like at the theater we, the audience would be ready to actively receive whatever spectacle was to be presented before us. What would unfold behind this unfurling fabric?
Would it be a treasure or a dud?
Would it be a treasure or a dud?
Some Heads
Leland Bell, Christopher Chippendale, Katie Claiborne, Susanna Coffey, Edgar Degas, Elaine Despins, Thomas Eakins, Emily Eveleth, Lucien Freud, Ann Gale, Alberto Giacometti, Elana Hagler, Israel Hershberg, Frank Hobbs, Peter Inglis, Alex Kanevsky, Diarmuid Kelley, Lotte Laserstein, Michal Lewit, Sangram Majumdar, Edouard Manet, Joe Morzuch, George Nick, Andy Pankhurst, Fausto Pirandello, Helene Schjerfbeck, John Singer Sargent, Tai-Shan Schierenberg, Evan Tyler Stallone, Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco, Roni Taharlev, Euan Uglow, Édouard Vuillard
Grid view with artist names
Quotations
Don't think: look!
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
In art you never hit what you’re aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.
— Robert Kulicke
There’s no story. I don’t want to tell stories.
Other people always read things into your work, which you can never see. That’s fine, that’s great. For me it was just exciting to look at it and try to do something with it.
— Lois Dodd
I have a criterion which requires my subject to have a precision which says, "I am a particular tree," or "This is a real location." I love this idea that correctness in nature brings about another dimension to the painting, at once abstract and specific, a line that speaks in the particular and alludes to a lot more.
— Sylvia Plimack Mangold
In art, as in everything else, one can only build upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom will be so much greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength.
— Igor Stravinsky
Precision is not the opposite of mystery.
— Louise Glück
My secret for success? Well it’s not a secret that I have never hung out too much and I’ve just worked very, very hard for thirty-five years. It’s just a lot of hard work. That’s my secret—it’s a big secret.
— Joan Snyder
I think we’re at a time where everything is abstract and everything is representational. It’s more about how you find your own language with paint. It’s really just your body and its relationship to the world. Using the senses is not anti-intellectual.
— Josephine Halvorson
Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
In art you never hit what you’re aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.
— Robert Kulicke
There’s no story. I don’t want to tell stories.
Other people always read things into your work, which you can never see. That’s fine, that’s great. For me it was just exciting to look at it and try to do something with it.
— Lois Dodd
I have a criterion which requires my subject to have a precision which says, "I am a particular tree," or "This is a real location." I love this idea that correctness in nature brings about another dimension to the painting, at once abstract and specific, a line that speaks in the particular and alludes to a lot more.
— Sylvia Plimack Mangold
In art, as in everything else, one can only build upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom will be so much greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength.
— Igor Stravinsky
Precision is not the opposite of mystery.
— Louise Glück
My secret for success? Well it’s not a secret that I have never hung out too much and I’ve just worked very, very hard for thirty-five years. It’s just a lot of hard work. That’s my secret—it’s a big secret.
— Joan Snyder
I think we’re at a time where everything is abstract and everything is representational. It’s more about how you find your own language with paint. It’s really just your body and its relationship to the world. Using the senses is not anti-intellectual.
— Josephine Halvorson
Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
— Edgar Degas
The harder you concentrate, the more things that are really in your head start coming out.
— Lucian Freud
I think we live in a paradise. This is the Garden of Eden, really it is. It might be the only paradise we ever know, and it's just so beautiful, with the trees and everything here, and you feel you want to paint it. Put it into a design. That's all I can say.
— Albert York
What are the tasks of painting? As a figurative artist, I have found the answers in early-modern and premodern works. Their power is in the visual invention, the meaning coming through the form. Good, old-fashioned stuff like that is always newer and better than apologetic, illustrational, never fully baked stuff. Embracing the great-grandparents and the grandparents is the greatest freedom: from theory, and from meaning that precedes the object and its colors, lines, and edges.
— Lisa Yuskavage
Marshal the power that omission donates to pictorial forms.
— unknown
The harder you concentrate, the more things that are really in your head start coming out.
— Lucian Freud
I think we live in a paradise. This is the Garden of Eden, really it is. It might be the only paradise we ever know, and it's just so beautiful, with the trees and everything here, and you feel you want to paint it. Put it into a design. That's all I can say.
— Albert York
What are the tasks of painting? As a figurative artist, I have found the answers in early-modern and premodern works. Their power is in the visual invention, the meaning coming through the form. Good, old-fashioned stuff like that is always newer and better than apologetic, illustrational, never fully baked stuff. Embracing the great-grandparents and the grandparents is the greatest freedom: from theory, and from meaning that precedes the object and its colors, lines, and edges.
— Lisa Yuskavage
Marshal the power that omission donates to pictorial forms.
— unknown
Some Books
Alphabetical by author
Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter — a life
by Patricia Albers
Blanche Lazzell — The Life and Work of an American Modernist
by Bridges, Olson and Snyder
Looking at the Overlooked —
Fours essays on still life painting by Norman Bryson
Albert York
by William Corbett
Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir
by William Corbett
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
by Eugene Delacroix
Conversations with Cezanne
edited by Michael Doran
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
by Mark Doty
Matisse on Art
edited by Jack Flam
Old Masters and Young Geniuses
by David W. Galenson
Man with a Blue Scarf
by Martin Gayford
Hawthorne on Painting
by Charles W. Hawthorne
Sargent's Daughters — The Biography of a Painting
by Erica E. Hirshler
Mysteries of the Rectangle
by Siri Hustvedt
Jasper Johns — Privileged Information
by Jill Johnston
Secret Lives in Art
by Jill Johnston
Lee Krasner: A Biography
by Gail Levin Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing
by Martha Livingstone
Portrait — The life of Thomas Eakins
by William S. McFeely
Art in its Own Terms
by Fairfield Porter
Let's See — Writings from the New Yorker
by Peter Schjeldahl
William Nicholson
by Sanford Schwartz
Fairfield Porter
by Justin Spring
The Unknown Matisse
by Hilary Spurling
Matisse the Master
by Hilary Spurling
De Kooning — An American Master
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Poetics of Music
by Igor Stravinsky
The Extreme of the Middle
by Jack Tworkov, edited by Mira Schor
Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter — a life
by Patricia Albers
Blanche Lazzell — The Life and Work of an American Modernist
by Bridges, Olson and Snyder
Looking at the Overlooked —
Fours essays on still life painting by Norman Bryson
Albert York
by William Corbett
Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir
by William Corbett
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix
by Eugene Delacroix
Conversations with Cezanne
edited by Michael Doran
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
by Mark Doty
Matisse on Art
edited by Jack Flam
Old Masters and Young Geniuses
by David W. Galenson
Man with a Blue Scarf
by Martin Gayford
Hawthorne on Painting
by Charles W. Hawthorne
Sargent's Daughters — The Biography of a Painting
by Erica E. Hirshler
Mysteries of the Rectangle
by Siri Hustvedt
Jasper Johns — Privileged Information
by Jill Johnston
Secret Lives in Art
by Jill Johnston
Lee Krasner: A Biography
by Gail Levin Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing
by Martha Livingstone
Portrait — The life of Thomas Eakins
by William S. McFeely
Art in its Own Terms
by Fairfield Porter
Let's See — Writings from the New Yorker
by Peter Schjeldahl
William Nicholson
by Sanford Schwartz
Fairfield Porter
by Justin Spring
The Unknown Matisse
by Hilary Spurling
Matisse the Master
by Hilary Spurling
De Kooning — An American Master
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Poetics of Music
by Igor Stravinsky
The Extreme of the Middle
by Jack Tworkov, edited by Mira Schor
Links
Stanley Bielen
Lisa Breslow
Lisa Breslow
Claudia Carr
Katie Claiborne
Katie Claiborne
Rackstraw Downes interviewed by David Cohen
Rackstraw Downes — New York Times
Rackstraw Downes — Brooklyn Rail
Rackstraw Downes — New York Times
Rackstraw Downes — Brooklyn Rail
John Dubrow Small Landscapes
Emily Eveleth
Emily Eveleth — Boston Globe
Figurative Art Center of Boston
Emily Eveleth
Emily Eveleth — Boston Globe
Figurative Art Center of Boston
Tim Kennedy essay: Human Measures
Ken Kewley — Albums
Ken Kewley — Albums
Painting: Personal and Powerful
Perceptual Painters
Picasso looks at Degas — Wall Street Journal
Ellen Phelan Interview— Bomb
Stephanie Pierce JSS Interview
Stephanie Pierce
Fairfield Porter — Smithsonian interview, 1968
Carolyn Pyfrom
Perceptual Painters
Picasso looks at Degas — Wall Street Journal
Ellen Phelan Interview— Bomb
Stephanie Pierce JSS Interview
Stephanie Pierce
Fairfield Porter — Smithsonian interview, 1968
Carolyn Pyfrom
Richard Raiselis
Harold Reddicliffe
Gareth Reid
Seymour Remenick — An appreciation by Stuart Shils
Harold Reddicliffe
Gareth Reid
Seymour Remenick — An appreciation by Stuart Shils
Rembrandt by Holland Carter, New York Times
Miles Richmond
Michael Russem — Kat Ran Press — Design and Typography
Conversation with EM Saniga
Miles Richmond
Michael Russem — Kat Ran Press — Design and Typography
Conversation with EM Saniga
Sargent on Painting
• Painting is an interpretation of tone.
• Keep the planes free and simple, drawing a full brush down the whole contour of a cheek.
• Always paint one thing into another and not side by side until they touch.
• The thicker your paint — the more your color flows.
• Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements — values, especially the values. You must clarify the values.
• The secret of painting is in the half tone of each plane, in economizing the accents and in the handling of the lights.
• You begin with the middle tones and work up from it .... so that you deal last with your lightest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.
• Paint in all the half tones and the generalized passages quite thick.
• It is impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong.
— John Singer Sargent
• Keep the planes free and simple, drawing a full brush down the whole contour of a cheek.
• Always paint one thing into another and not side by side until they touch.
• The thicker your paint — the more your color flows.
• Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements — values, especially the values. You must clarify the values.
• The secret of painting is in the half tone of each plane, in economizing the accents and in the handling of the lights.
• You begin with the middle tones and work up from it .... so that you deal last with your lightest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.
• Paint in all the half tones and the generalized passages quite thick.
• It is impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong.
— John Singer Sargent
Lennart Anderson on Painting
For me, painting from nature is akin to playing music. The notes are there. One tries to get them down in the proper proportion to bring out the proper impression. Realizing your palette is limited; it cannot begin to have the richness, the depth from light to dark that nature encompasses or the subtlety of it. Nature seems to strain for its effects, and yet it has so much power. One always wants to feel confident that one is painting what one see, but nature is not always what it seems. One seeks to disarm the objects as objects to seek for an agreement of tone that encompasses differences of color that can cross the barriers of object. It is these agreements, these similarities that float in and out, that coordinate the work and allow the subject matter to have its eloquence. It amazes me how the same material can be seen in so many different ways, all in an honest attempt to see it justly.
An Encounter with Euan Uglow
by Tai-Shan Schierenberg
Girlfriends by Tai-Shan Schierenberg
Marigold by Euan Uglow
I had been doing the usual: chucking on the paint, wasting prodigious amounts of energy and materials. Sometimes, something would appear in this undisciplined mess, full of vitality and beauty. However it all smacked of monkeys and typewriters, and my understanding of the way painting worked was purely instinctual.
Then one day, in my last term, Euan strolled by, small and intense, dressed in black, eyes accentuated by his rather thick glasses, and told me that I didn't know what I was doing. Now usually this would have led to a fair bit of antagonism.
But on this day, like a good Zen master dealing with a stupid and recalcitrant student, Euan timed his approach perfectly, and cutting the crap, just asked me which color I thought was the most prominent when I looked at the posing model, and how light or dark I thought it was. Then, after I had mixed and applied that to the canvas, we moved to the next most prominent color, and its tone, and most importantly the relationship to the first color. And so on. Until I had filled the canvas, often with colors that seemed totally wrong but had been ascertained by their relationship to other colors.
There magically appeared on my canvas the model in all her three-dimensional glory. After some fine-tuning, it became a great little painting which I still keep as a memento to Euan Uglow in my studio. In twenty minutes, he had shown me a fundamental building block, which I was able to adapt to my own painting needs, for which I am eternally grateful.
Tai-Shan Schierenberg studied painting with Euan Uglow
at the Slade School in London.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)