The Line of Inquiry and Paintings, Flowers and Flamenco: We Must Be In Benicia

We went to the Open Studios at Benicia and met some wonderful artists. I am finding that I really like to look at works that I find moving and find the line of influence: what other artists keep these contemporary painters company?  Diane Williams, of the I An I Studio on Jackson Street, displayed several gorgeous and powerful large paintings. An early oil, once part of a fifteen-foot triptych, was filed with energy:

And, because of the way I see painting now, I thought immediately of John Singer Sargent's "El Jaleo."  No, the Sargent isn't an abstract and it is horizontal, but take a look at the colors -- the deep blacks, the grays, the hints, here, of orange that explode in the piece by Williams -- and the mood:

The viewer's eye is carried through the painting along the same -- driving -- curves.  The layers of shadow and foreground/background here, and the dancer and her band, form the same kinds of intricate relationships for us to study. 

My husband's clear favorite -- of all of Diane Williams's work on show -- was this painting, which anchors a front wall of her studio space; she calls these forms "Chrysanthemums":

Stunning.  And here, I love this painting, but I am torn trying to find the direct line to this breakthrough.  When I think about other artists who have pursued these rounded bursts of color, I have two people in mind. The first is Joan Mitchell and "Sunflowers":

And the second is Cy Twombly's "Rose" series:

There is a kind of beauty-coming-right-off-the-canvas here, in all three of these works, that means we can keep looking. These paintings are filled with joy.

Too Much Color? Cy Twombly didn't think so....

In the November, 2011, issue of Artforum,  Arthur C. Danto reflects on getting to know Cy Twombly. Danto tells us in passing that Twombly felt the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel created what he called "Mannerist masterpieces." So I went back to my art books for some help. The term "Mannerist" is argued over a fair amount, but generally has come to describe a 16th-century movement, with the central painters being Bronzino, Parmigianino, and Tintoretto. Some characteristics that seem agreed-upon include:  distorted figures, small, crowded spaces and unrealistic settings  -- which create drama -- and, finally,  the Mannerist artist stresses his skill in the painting of drapery, skin, and the effects of light.

Here is a portion of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel:

When we entered the chapel, it was very difficult to see details like this. The paintings are so far away. But we did see the colors.  And that was a big change; for years, every reproduction I saw of these panels was dominated by grays and browns, shadows without light.  I remember, too, that after the work was cleaned, beginning in the 1980's, many people felt the colors were too brash, too much. But Twombly did not feel that way. So what paintings might he have compared it to?

There was a 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston called "Titian~Tintoretto~Veronese:  Rivals in Renaissance Venice."  In their catalogue, the curators discuss the ways in which these artists watched one another's progress (rather in the way Picasso would come to monitor the discoveries of Matisse).  They competed for commissions.  Tintoretto painted "Miracle of the Slave" in 1548; it was his breakthrough. Here it is:

And we were worried about the colors in the Chapel? Look at this space... look at the ways in which the figures are moving... look at the backdrop (an operatic backdrop, missing only the Supertitles)... look at the gestures... the oranges, the blues... this is wonderful work... Michelangelo is in good company. I love it when one artist calls across the centuries to another.  We will miss Twombly.

WAVES: "And I got into the wet," said Cy Twombly

We drove to Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was beautiful, cool, very windy, as you will hear:

Waves, and more waves. We had just been to the Legion of Honor, and had seen a wonderful painting by Claude Monet called "Waves Breaking"; here is a detail:

 

And we thought ... Twombly!  So I went back to paintings I remembered from a show we had seen years ago, to "Untitled," from 1970, created from oil and house paint and crayon, on a very big canvas (11' 4" x 13' 3"):

Most people, (including, up until now, me), would call this one of Twombly's "Blackboard" paintings. But, having seen the waves at Baker Beach, and the Monet in some detail, I now think this is a "Wave" painting: look at those repeating circles, which now seem less like cursive writing than breaking waves.  And, if you want a Twombly painting where the cursive waves pick up Monet's colors, and add to that a sense of sky. It is "Untitled," from 1964 and 1984 (quite a span, that!), oil and pencil and crayon, 6' 8 3/8" x 8' 2 1/4":

 

This is one of my favorite Twomblys.  Perhaps it's just the sea air from today,  but this painting is the sea, for me. And just in case you thought Twombly didn't ever think of water, here is a quote from an interview with Nicolas Serota in The Guardian (June 2, 2008). Cy Twombly said that as he grew older, he'd had to shift the way he worked, so that someone else needed to get on that ladder and prep his surface:

"Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favourite thing - pencil is more my medium than wet paint. I did by mistake paint on a picture in Lexington and then quickly put an image on top. And I got into the wet. I had the background painted, worked into it and then merged the background and surfaces. Before, I always had a dry background and painted on. Now, I have someone paint the background that I have already figured out."


I really love the idea of the crisply-dressed Twombly getting "into the wet."  Happy wading.

An annotation for Cy Twombly

 "                    ....  Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made."
                                     from Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West," from 1934


I have been reading Patricia Meyer Spacks's annotated Pride and Prejudice. I was worried that she might include too many instances of mere "translation":  Bingley's "design" means his "plan," that sort of thing.  And there are a few simple explanations... but principally what matters to Spacks is her observations.  She discusses the importance of the "visit" -- acquaintances must begin, yet only a man may visit another man, and that first visit should be made promptly (p. 31, note 13) -- I feel these notes are very useful to twenty-first-century readers, who do not "visit."   About a request from her father, "What say you Mary? for you are a lady of deep reflection..." that poor Mary is unable to answer, "Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how," Spacks says this: "Austen's capacity at least momentarily to solicit sympathy for foolish Mary, as earlier for foolish Mrs. Bennett, suggests the breadth of her comprehension" (p.37, final sentence of note 17).  It isn't simply vocabulary, or story ... it is the very nature of the author's "comprehension."

This got me wondering about the nature of annotation, and, beyond its meaning an explanation or comment,  the origins of the word: it comes from the Latin annotare, "to mark."  And I thought how used we are to annotating texts and reading marginal notes in texts; but we are not at all used to the idea of annotating a painting. Museum and gallery labels inform, but distract from the thing itself. Perhaps words are not the useful thing to comment on painting. Maybe we need to go back to Stevens's "Idea of Order": creative marks may be made to comment on other creative works... paint and pencil annotate paintings and drawings. So here is an annotation for Cy Twombly from me, a drawing called "Orange Slices":

The "white, white" sea (Twombly's words), continued...

Subjectivity. My own... here is a short display of what I sometimes go through as I am assessing work. Start with two sketches, the paintings from photographs, like yesterday's, of the Sound peeking through:

The top drawing is, for me, too claustrophobic. I was working to "make visible" the spaces between the tree branches, to give them their own space, but, instead, they are clogged with paint. The lower sketch, however, still has both air and sky... it is, to me, a far better indicator of the "space between" that I saw on my walk.

But, then, my husband says that all argument and interpretation is made up of logic, observations, references, definitions, etc., assembled to prove, support or demonstrate ideas arrived at spontaneously, by intuition, in a flash. We feel ... and then we scramble to prove the feeling to be right or "true." So, in the case of the drawings above, I say that the top sketch is claustrophobic because of clogged paint. I want to try to "explain" my feeling.  Perhaps, in art, that isn't always possible.

Cy Twombly has died in Rome...

His style of art, for abstract painters, is so influential. His art can look like elegant graffiti, as he carves into white paint or a black "chalkboard" as if the canvas were marble.  Somehow, he makes scrumbled, layered, almost "erased" paint look beautiful. Twombly also is less well-known, I think, than some of his contemporaries, like Jasper Johns; he is something of a painter's painter, perhaps.

My husband has written a piece of tanka-prose poetry about Twombly:

Some Lost Dialogue from Catallus’ Leaving

Cy Twombly died yesterday — the great scribbler line-drawer smudge-maker magician.  Watch that circle going up, coming over, down.  Roller-coaster art.  How little suggestion a flower takes, how little influence a single brush-stroke makes: two dollops of red, yellows, greens violet, and white daubed on and you have the idea, the idea of a great bouquet but he drew no flowers.  A large red circle and he lay down for a nap.

speaks in infinitives,

undifferentiated

insides

where motives spring

origins of things to do

describing

to and fro trancelike

ebb and flow

you look in

just your running through

words

a few at a time

abandoning them

you look in

search for the plot

but there’s none

this fruitless searching

did you know

a secret

did you have one?

---Charles Tarlton