"Not known, because not looked for..."

This is an enormous -- "brushstroke" -- sculpture in front of the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in Washington D.C..   As you know from my Benday Dot posts and drawings (March 7, 10, 12 and June 17), I really, really like Lichtenstein's work. Seurat, Monet and Picasso all presented us with the ways we see ...  and Lichtenstein's work continues to expose the way we see as an illusion ... but, as with this brushstroke, an illusion we can be "in" on, and illusion we can enjoy, once we see it for what it is,  as something that is both amusing and beautiful.

But Lichtenstein is criticized; just take a look at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/06/art/the-pleasures-of-art-peter-selz-with-jarrett-earnest    And so, please, be sure to take a long, fair look at the work, not the work in reproduction ... see the artist's hand, the size of the original, the space it occupies...

Oh, and the quote in the title? from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," The Four Quartets, and again

"Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea..."

What do you think of Lichtenstein?

Benday and the Jets....

I do think I have figured out the Benday dot painting. If you know the close-together dots of the comic book and (particularly the early) Roy Lichtensteins, you may not recognize the influence, since the dots here are "so spaced out" (that phrase always reminds me of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's "Bennie and the Jets," I can't help it)... but the fact is that Lichtenstein, even though his art doesn't have as many (apparent) followers as Cubism, created something just as radical, a kind of departure for how we perceive space. And when you see his work in person, it gets to you. It certainly got to me. And so I have moved the dots away from each other to see if that would make that "space-between" any more visible. And then inside each dot is a piece of landscape, the skies, the grasses, the mustard flowers and a bit of vine from driving through Napa... and the mist, because it was raining, is everywhere else... and the tiled border, the three white squares, is for safety. And the painting seems joyful to me... I am delighted with it... I think it is done!

Napa, crossing York Creek

The rain seemed to bring out the patterns of the vines. The branches were all trimmed to the same height, the rows were impossibly even, wires and posts ensured that nothing would escape. The grass in some vineyards was trimmed or pulled; in others, grass and yellow mustard blossoms took our attention away from the gray skies and the bare branches. No leaves yet. Mists rose partway up the mountains, peaks still visible, nearly a Japanese print. It was really really pretty.

So, given that this world was so lush, I felt I had to take another run at my Benday dot monotype. I decided to try something I had heard that Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had each done: re-visit a print and add layers ... not via the press, but by adding oil-stick or acrylic paint ... I have re-worked prints, but never so thoroughly ... so I sanded the interiors of each "dot" and then painted over the sanded circle, following the colors of the wet wine country and leaving the initial blue of the print alone.  The monotype has new life, I think:

The sky, the clouds, the mists, the grasses, the quiet vines, the mustard flowers are all there.

Benday Dots ... and Fail Better, with Sushi Boats

So I had an idea for a monotype. I started to wonder about Roy Lichtenstein's Benday dots, the ones that he enlarged from their comic book beginnings. I thought that if I could print a scattering of such dots, farther away from one another, that we might, perhaps, be able to see the colors between. And space, which, unless you are Vermeer, and so few of us are, is REALLY hard to paint.  So I imagined a back porch somewhere in the vicinity of some cabernet sauvignon vines and some sky and some fluffy white clouds and I tried for a sketch and I tried, then, for a print. Here is a corner of the monotype, run twice through the press, fastened to my drawing board:

 The dots have taken on an ugly thick impasto and are not the lovely, delicate things I had hoped for.  And they didn't take on a life of their own; rather, they just sit there, lifeless inks over ink on paper. I do toss a rather large percentage of my prints, because, sometimes, art fails. Samuel Beckett wrote, in Worstward Ho: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Fail again. Fail better."  So, since I still like the idea, my "fail better" will be a painting of the same idea, and here is the sketch:

Tomorrow, maybe. Today, instead, for a whole different kind of space, we went to San Francisco's Japantown. We ate lunch at the restaurant that apparently started the idea of the sushi boat, Isobune, and people just kept coming in, for the salmon and the eel and the seaweed salad and the octopus and the tempura rolls and the crabmeat ... and later we stopped in at two different stationers and came home with a series of clear plastic file folders because, well, they are so beautiful, and they cost, I think, $2.49 each:

And so it is now time to watch the reflections come up on our windows, as the sky darkens, and "fail better" tomorrow: