PAINTING: POWERS OF OBSERVATION: January 2012

The Figure Dressed

A painting workshop with Catherine Kehoe

Euan Uglow

First two weekends in June
At Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Classroom figure paintings are based on a strange premise: a group of clothed painters surrounding a naked person. This workshop will provide an opportunity to paint the clothed figure in a context that more closely resembles our daily experience. Each weekend there will be a single pose/model, allowing extended time for development of a painting beyond the usual single-class structure. The emphasis will be on seeing what is before our eyes and finding a truthful yet surprising equivalent in paint. We will ask how little information is necessary to convey the sense of the figure in relation to the space it inhabits, while being as accurate as possible about the large notes of color and value, and their relationships. Color mixing and use of a specific palette (no earth colors) will be covered. We will work in the spirit of visual research rather than making a finished painting. Oil paint is the preferred medium; some experience with oil paint is required.

Helene Schjerfbeck

SCHEDULE
Friday, June 1, 7-9 p.m.
Saturday, June 2, 10 am-4:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 3, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Saturday, June 9, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 10, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. (includes breaks for lunch and dinner)

Click here to register

Paul Cezanne

Painting of the Week

Janice Nowinski
Review on Huffington Post
Exhibit at Bowery Gallery
530 W. 25th Street
4th Floor
New York, NY
May 22-June 16, 2012

Quotation of the Week

The one thing I can say about images and work with images, if I can put their function into one sentence: it’s the thing that gives you the feeling that life is worth living. Which is step one. I’m not saying it’s really worth living or it’s fantastic. I’m saying it’s also the thing that will keep you from killing yourself and others. So it’s a public service, I think, to engage in images.
— Lynda Barry

Ruth Miller's Atmosphere of Thought

By Kim Sloane

“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

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

November 2011

Kim Sloane is a painter who teaches at Pratt Institute.

www.kimsloane.com

Some Still Life Paintings

Paintings by William Barnes, 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, Diarmuid, Kelley, 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, Emil Robinson, 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.

Some Figure Paintings

Paintings by Linda Anderson, Kimberlee Alemian, Rosemarie Beck, Paul Cezanne, Lin Chen, Edgar Degas, Andre Derain, Edwin Dickinson, John Dubrow, Phyllis Floyd, Lucian Freud, Ann Gale, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Charles Hawthorne, Chelsea James, Alex Kanevsky, Diarmuid Kelley, Tim Kennedy, Ken Kewley, Kurt Knoblesdorf, Lotte Laserstein, Susan Lichtman, Sangram Majumdar, Eve Mansdorf, Henri Matisse, Joe Morzuch, Alice Neel, Janice Nowinski, Nathan Oliveira, Andy Pankhurst, Fausto Pirandello, Nicole McCormick Santiago, Tai Shan Schierenberg, Helene Schjerfbeck, Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco, Euan Uglow, David Wooddell

GRID VIEW WITH ARTIST NAMES

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

52 Nudes Through Art History

Paintings by Ken Kewley
Link to grid view

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.

Ruth Miller

LINK TO GRID VIEW

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.

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 Blue
Ultramarine 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 can’t settle on green. For years I always had sap green on the palette but now it has been replaced with Viridian. But I also use sap green, permanent green, cadmium green light and Terra Verte. I also mix many of the greens.

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, Andre Derain, Lois Dodd, Tina Engels, Yuval Etzioni, Phyllis Floyd, Elana Hagler, Rebecca Harp, Israel Hershberg, David Hockney, Diana Horowitz, Paul Inglis, Chelsea James, Rebecca Kallem, Alex Kanevsky, Ken Kewley, John Lee, 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, Brian Rego, Celia Reisman, Yael Scalia, Claire Sherman, Helene Schjerfbeck, Stuart Shils, Telemaco Signorini, Harry Stooshinoff, Peter Van Dyck
LINK TO GRID VIEW

Straight lines/curved forms

Link to grid view with artist names

Fluidity in Focus

This essay was written by Christopher Chippendale

on the occasion of his exhibit at Soprafina Gallery, December 2011

Je ne puis pas distinguer entre le sentiment que j'ai de la vie et la façon dont je le traduis.*
—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.

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?

Some Drawings

Link to grid view

Diebenkorn's Notes to Himself

The following list was found among the papers of the painter Richard Diebenkorn after his death in 1993. Spelling and capitalization are as in the original.

Notes to myself on beginning a painting

1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued — except as a stimulus for further moves.

3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.

4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.

5. Dont “discover” a subject — of any kind.

6. Somehow don’t be bored — but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.

7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.

8. Keep thinking about Pollyanna.

9. Tolerate chaos.

10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

Some Heads

Leland Bell, Lin Chen, 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, John Lee, 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, John Wentz
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?

— 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

Chuck Close: Note To Younger Self

Courtesy of CBS News

I was in the eighth grade and was told not to even think about going to college. I couldn’t add or subtract, never could memorize multiplication tables, was advised against taking algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry. Since I was good with my hands I was advised to aim for trade school, perhaps body and fender work.

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you. I applied to a junior college in my hometown with open enrollment, got in and embarked on a career in the visual arts. Virtually everything I’ve done is influenced by my learning disabilities. I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out I can remember it much better.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I’ve ever had grew out of work itself. Sign on to a process and see where it takes you. You don’t have to invent the wheel every day. Today you’ll do what you did yesterday, tomorrow you’ll do what you did today. Eventually you’ll get somewhere. No one gets anywhere without help. Mentors, including your parents, can make you feel special even when you’re failing in other areas. Everyone needs to feel special.

My father died when I was eleven and that was the tragedy of my life, a horrible thing to happen when you’re so young. Oddly enough, there was a gift in this tragedy. I learned very early in life that the absolute worst thing can happen to you and you will get past it and you will be happy again. Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.

If you’re overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into many bite-size pieces. Quadriplegics don’t envy the able-bodied, we envy paraplegics. We think they’ve got a much easier row to hoe. There’s always someone worse off than you. I’m confident that no artist has more pleasure, day in and day out from what he or she does, than I do.

CBS Video: Chuck Close Notes to My Younger Self

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