Summer Tangle

Summer Tangle

  oil on canvas  30" x 40"

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes 

but in having new eyes”.    Marcel Proust

Rather than conform to cultural notions of beauty, it is far more rewarding to allow oneself to wander freely in the visual chaos and struggle to find form or understanding. In this pursuit beauty will appear as if by magic. This place is in a wooded spot near a creek, not a mile from my home. Ordinary and overgrown, most likely a pathway cut by deer going down to the creek, it just attracted my attention and I can't really say why. That's how it works best, almost an unconscious selecting - 

I guess just my way of going about "having new eyes".

August Farm

August Farm

  oil on canvas 

"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."                                                                                           Robert Henri

The last thing on earth I want to do is go around making pretty pictures. There are hundreds of skilled technicians out there making paintings suitable for living rooms and dining rooms and some even specialize in office lobbies and bank anterooms (usually larger versions of pretty views). This kind of work sometimes tells a story or is concerned with subjects rural and picturesque.  I've noticed many of its practitioners have been trained as illustrators and this is what they still practice, illustration. 

I am not saying such pretty paintings are bad or wrong-headed - just that they bore me with their calculated attractiveness. I seek out the awkward note in a painting that seems to point the way to a more immediate involvement with what is discovered rather than what is being imitated. Once I find a visual trigger in some set of visual opposites; shadow and light, warmth and coolness, mass and space - once I find a small piece of visual poetry - then I can immerse myself in the viscous quality of the paint and the battle of focusing on truly seeing what is before me and not what I think is before me.

The love of the paint, the color, the abstracted vision are my touchstones and abandoning the resulting image to those ideas is my joy. Now, if a barn happens to appear as a functioning part of my work - two rectangles holding sa space through color and placement - well it just as well could be a cheeseburger or a naked lady - it doesn't mean I have morphed into a 'painter of barns', simply that it was part of a place , a time, a visual exploration. 

Imaginitive Transformation

Mossy Stump

 oil on linen panel  8" x 10"

'The purpose of art is the imaginative transformation of the mind."

                                                                    Wallace Stevens

       If we agree that Wallace Stevens' idea about art is an important and even the best description of what art must be about, we can come to some wondrous conclusions. The first is to understand that all the arts are united in the same task and in ways subtle and obvious, feed off of and nourish each other. The second would have to put an end to any limitation on sources or methods or materials or ideas, other than the qualification they must speak from and to the human condition. 

      A question that often came up in my classroom was in reference to how we might discern 'good art from bad art' - or better still, 'visually effective art from dull or disinteresting art".  That is where the skill sets acquired through motivated practice come in to play. In the visual arts drawing, composition, color, perspective, skilled handling of materials are the primary skills, with drawing above all. Perhaps here is where it all can sometimes run adrift.

     Somewhere along the line, (no pun intended), drawing becomes so concerned with its end results it devolves into an imitation of what sits before the artist. A dull accuracy in imitation is what teenagers will often mistake for 'good art', - the more photographic , the better. Instead, drawing as the source headwaters of all visual art forms must be an open-ended investigation. More accurately, drawing must be the nuanced record of one's unknowing investigation of a slice of the visual world. 

     All preconceived notions and supposed visual experience must be discarded in this sort of drawing - one must approach it as if one had just been given sight by miracle and all the visual world is new and uncertain. Against this uncertainty the artist is armed only with eyes to see and a mark making tool to record with. Its important to understand that all art forms must proceed with the same innocent ignorance and simply use the art form to discover and record the exploration. 

      The habit of working toward an undetermined end and allowing the journey to become the purpose (instead of a piece of 'art') the artist begins to undergo Steven's 'imaginative transformation' and happily, so does the artist's work. The world is transformed into a seductive, massive chaotic tangle - waiting to be explored and embraced. As soon as one recognizes this effect it becomes addictive - one cannot wait to begin each work anew - to further one's own imaginative transformation in experiencing the visual world. . Another benefit is an renewed ability to better recognize when one's work is getting toward the visually effective and away from the dull and disinterested.

'My head is bursting..."

Windfall 1

 9" x 12"  oil on linen

Windfall 2 

 9" x 12"  oil on linen

“Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It's enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.”     Claude Monet

I've discovered that the only way to relieve the 'bursting head syndrome' Monet refers to, (and I've suffered from this problem all my life), is to perform a metaphorical trepanning every day by trying to paint something of beauty. Trepanning as I understand it, was a way of relieving pressure on the brain by drilling a hole in one's skull - sometimes an emergency technique for severe head injury. Doctors performed an actual trepanning on the painter George Braque to help him with head injuries suffered as a soldier in WWI. He survived to paint well for years after this procedure! 

Back to the Monet quote and the idea of the head bursting with ideas - I have found the real key to the cure for trying to grab onto all the amazing beauty that confronts the painter is twofold. First, one must have a way of selecting and simplifying. My way is to allow myself to wander visually and land upon any possible thing that I find intriguing. No judging - I'll turn off my "good/bad - correct/incorrect" brain and just allow myself to look and feel and think. Some subject will trigger if I don't force it in any way. THEN I STOP!! I have to now really investigate along the lines of - 1. What is the poetry here (the star of the show)? 2. What is the visual structure of elements that brings forth the poetry? 3. What will my strategy be (color scheme, mark making, emphasis/de-emphasis, and so on) to keep the poetry alive and deliver it to the viewer? After careful consideration of these questions - I'm ready to start setting up and painting.

So, first a trigger and second an investigation. This way one can come to grips each day with the overwhelming sense of possibility and beauty. Once one gets into the habit of the two steps, one is free to paint as Robert Henri once described,

"A man singing and striding over the top of a hill".  
I always try to keep my picture of that happy man in mind.

Morning Lake, Maine
   oil on panel   8" x 10"

"Art very possibly ought to be the supreme achievement, the 'accomplishment', but there is the other satisfactory effect, that of a man hurling himself at an indomitable chaos and yanking and hauling as much of it as possible into some sort of order (or beauty), aware of it both as chaos and as potential."

                                                                                                                      Ezra Pound

     I read somewhere that Henry Moore once described happiness as having something one cannot possibly ever accomplish that one works at with all of one's capacity every day. I believe both Moore and Pound were speaking of the same thing. I would agree with them both.

Stumps, And More

Stump 1

  oil on linen panel  20" x 24"

Stump 2

  oil on linen panel  20" x 24"

" A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When one always makes your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."
                                                                                                                 Edgar Degas

     While hiking through a fir and pine forest in western Maryland, hefting my backpack loaded with my painting box and supplies, heading for the rock cliffs along Muddy Creek Falls, I made a discovery. On the forest floor just off the trail, among the gigantic firs, there were a great number of ancient stumps and remnants of fallen trees. In various stages of decay, the great trunks dissolving into red-orange-brown soil and the stumps various shades of blue green moss and lichen and rotting wood. Some were hard or dry enough to stand up out of the decay were bleached cream color with streaks of orange and blue grey.  They were incredible.
        I never made it down the trail to the rocks and falls that day or on several more.  I was enthralled by these relics, each one was evidence of the crashing down of giant trees in the past and the materials of new growth on the forest floor that they were becoming. The evidence of time compressed; past, present, future. Presented here are two examples of paintings wrestled from that forest - and I'm certain more will follow.
                                                              

And now, for something completely different.

 River Day

 oil on canvas 30" x 38"

View of The Potomac from Murray Hill

 oil on panel 9" x 12"

Feeling summery-ish? Here's a couple of views of the Potomac on a warm summer day - from two completely different points of view. Someone once said all art is a matter of scale and point of view.I would add the visual sensibility of the artist that enables the everyday to be transformed to the transcendent - the poetry of the moment, if you like. Enjoy!

Along The Shore

 oil on panel  9" x 20"

"I can think of no greater happiness than to be clear-sighted and know the miracle when it happens." Robert Henri

This artist/painter and his book, 'The Art Spirit', has been a guiding light for me for many years. I believe the book was put together by his students after he passed - it is a treasure!

Sometimes when painting the miracle seems rather evasive - at those times one must have a little faith, stop pursuing the 'Art' - and disappear into the process. That is when the happiness returns and the miracles have a chance!

Dirt Path, Maine

 oil on linen 16" x 20"

"I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. 

A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, 

and one in which to practice his art."    

                                                                         Pierre Bonnard

Exactly!  This one is from the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge near Calais, Maine.

Rowing In / Lake Inlet

 oil on linen 9" x 12"

"I do not care for the subject. What I care for is what happens between me and the subject."

Claude Monet

Some paintings' subjects are just sitting there, waiting for one to see what is before them. The danger is to be completely seduced by the place, by the thing-ness about the place, to the point of simply copying or illustrating the thing. The key to avoiding artless illustration or cliched imitation is in trying to be attuned to the expressive poetry of the place, the space, the quality of light. Often this can be accessed by imagining a painting strategy based on one's expressive intent - the strategy helps to focus on the poetry - the essence of what is happening between the artist and the subject. (Guess that guy Monet knew something!)

Maine Day 1

 oil on linen  8" x 10"

Maine Day 2 

 oil on linen  9" x 12"

OK, on these two linen panels I'm beginning to get a handle on what I'm after - searching out some kind visual form amongst the awe - filled chaos. Visual form is a term that can be substituted with meaning or understanding or even beauty - all dangerously misinterpreted and variable. What I suppose any art form is after is some small statement of the truth, truth based on the difficult task of seeing /finding the essence of being alive at that moment, in that place. Any method, style or persona can work when tempered by deep engagement withe process. Sound like mumbo-jumbo? Probably shouldn't allow yourself to be here reading - for the rest of the visitors, however, I'd welcome your reactions. Enjoy!

Bears Den 12

B.D. 12

 oil on linen  16" x 20"

"To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception. The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness" 

Robert Irwin

One of the best things one learns (and constantly re-learns) when trying to make a painting, is the deciding of what is important and what is peripheral. To sharpen one's visual perception to the point of understanding what one sees without attaching names or objectifying it. This goes back to something I often repeated to my students - 'first find the poetry of what you are seeing and then choose the elements that will get you to that poetry'. One must always remind oneself to stop, don't rush in headlong, and contemplate what visual incident triggered the poetry of the moment - 

what are you in love with - then work like hell to grasp it while it is still present! 

This visual poetry is unnamable and yet absolutely necessary.