"I have done a good deal of skying...": the Artist's Statement II

What we would all like, I suspect, is a chance to see the artist at work. Here is a photograph of the painter Trevor Bell, who lives and works near Penzance, Cornwall:

Lovely. A cup of tea, a bit of small talk, and then some big questions, please....

So why would an artist find it difficult to write out a statement?  Perhaps today's truth will be obsolete as you move into a new painting phase. Perhaps you don't really see your own work as clearly as you hope. Or, worst of all, perhaps someone might come along and say to you, "well, if you really knew what you were doing, if you were John Constable or someone like that, you might not feel such a need to talk about your work; it would all be so clear."

To which I would say, "Really? Let's test your theory, shall we?" And off we go in search of John Constable. We saw this painting at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven: "Hadleigh Castle, the mouth of the Thames: Morning after a Stormy Night" from 1829:

 

It is the morning after a storm, as he has mentioned in the title. The light would be constantly shifting; it wouldn't be easy to re-capture the exact shadows, even coming out at the same time every day.  But he is an accomplished painter by this time, aged 53. He knows the days are always too short; he complained once to a friend that there is too little daylight, "imagine to yourself how a pearl must look through a burnt glass" (in other words, no reflection, no transparency, nothing to paint at all).  On one painting trip, Constable wrote a friend that "I have done a good deal of skying for I am determined to conquer all difficulties." (And, in fact, there was an entire wall at Yale filled with his sky studies).

Now, look again at the painting. The sky seems perfect, reflecting a lonely landscape lit, only for the moment, by the aftermath of rain.  And look again, just for a minute or two, and fix for yourself, in your mind, the emotion, the scale, the breadth of what Constable has captured on the canvas. Now, here is the final public statement that Constable made about his work, just seven years later, one year before he died: "Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments."

Maybe it's just me ... but does this painting look like a scientific experiment to you?  Constable wrote another letter "quite alone amongst the Oaks and solitude of Helmingham Park,"  where he said he was not entirely sure, yet, of the quality of the work he had done so far; he did not know, he said, "what I may have to show you .... I shall not come home yet."  His inquiries were continuing on. Even Constable, it seems, wanted to leave a written record of what he believed he had achieved with his art, and even we might disagree with what he concluded ...

"So," says your skeptical friend, "jump ahead a bit, and look at Cezanne. He didn't need any notes."  You smile, just for a second. "Okay."  So you go to the man who painted with Pissarro, who showed the next generation of artists the way forward, a new way of seeing.  And you find he did converse, quite freely, about the ways he worked: "Basically I don't think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them onto my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose."  Yes, very funny. No, really, what happened?  Well, Cezanne wrote in a letter from Estaque (a sea-side town near Marseille) to Pissarro that "the sun here is so terrific that objects appear silhouetted not only in white or black, but in blue, red, brown, violet. I may be wrong, but it seems to me the opposite of modeling."  And that is true. When we lived in Malta, the sun, even in winter, was so strong, so "white," that it flattened everything out, and it flattened things out just in their own colors. What Cezanne was doing, in his pulling colors onto the canvas, was, perhaps, just seeing the south for itself.

So, what does Cezanne tell us about what artists should do? he says "the artist must silence all the voices of prejudice within him, he must forget .... and then the entire landscape will engrave itself on the sensitive part of his being."  As proof, here Cezanne will tell us that he waited and waited before he painted the mountain that is forever linked to him: "For a long time I was unable to paint [Mont] Sainte-Victoire ... because ... I imagined the shadow had to be concave, whereas in fact it's convex, it disperses outward from the centre.  Instead of accumulating, it evaporates, becomes fluid, bluish, participating in the movements of the surrounding air." 

This is from 1904. I feel that I haven't seen it before. I never saw the interchange between the air and the mountain before, not until I read that last observation.

Perhaps the ideal artist's statement is not about what you actually paint but about the nexus of stimuli in which you are working ... the air that shapes you.  That's where I am going to start.

the conversation piece

The New York Times ran a photograph of a painting by Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), because the Yale Center for British Art will be exhibiting his work.  Zoffany was born in Frankfurt, studied in Rome, and moved to England, where he would stay for most of his life. He was a specialist in painting small group scenes, a tradition that began in the Netherlands and found a niche in the England of George III (Zoffany would paint Queen Charlotte and her family twice, in fact).  These paintings, showing people in their homes, with their possessions, playing instruments, at meals, or outdoors on their estates all came to be known as "conversation pieces." Queen Elizabeth II has a large collection of Zoffany works and exhibited them in 2008-10, along with similar works by other artists, such as Sir Edwin Landseer's portrait of the young Queen Victoria and Albert, "Windsor Castle in Modern Times." Zoffany left England, lived in India for six years and returned home in 1779 to a world that no longer valued the conversation piece. But I am getting ahead of myself ....

I was originally drawn to the "conversation piece" painting because I thought it might be another instance of my Queen's Skirt idea (see two days ago and July 13). There is, in Zoffany's work,  a clear fascination with the silks at the window and the laces round the necks and the sheen on the cello, all to the exclusion of any kind of attention to the actual faces. Look at "The Gore Family" (1775-6), set one woman's face against another and try to find any difference between them.  I will concede that the two men's faces are distinct from one another, but still. So, a bit of Queen's Skirt, and yet, there's something else going on here. Look again:

This isn't merely a show of possessions. Yes, the wood of the instruments and the chairs is polished and carefully turned and yes, the skirts have all the requisite ruffles.  But look at the two things Zoffany has really painted with care: look first at the "window." Is it a window? Suddenly, we are outdoors! And we have a draped fabric, not a curtain, not a furnishing at all, but a transparent orange cloud, leading to a dramatic Tuscan hill (this was painted near Volterra) ... how beautiful that is! (Christo, are you there?). Then, second, look at the light in the painting behind the group. The art is (just ever so lightly) trumping the group sitting before it. (Ars longa, vita brevis?).  It could be a comment that this family values the work and wanted it as a focus, more than they wanted a recitation in paint of all their worldly goods. Or it could be the artist's trademark. See the next painting, the one that really caught my eye in miniature in the Times. It is "The Blair Family," from 1786-87:

The Queen's Skirt is alive here, too: look at the fabulous blue of Madame's robe. And yet, again, we have two anomalies. Here, again, we have the majesty of the paintings. The largest work is cut off at the top, and yet, the colors there and in the small side pieces dominate, picking up the color in the dress and then the center painting adds a shimmering pink -- just in case there was any doubt about where we should look. When I looked up Zoffany, I found that he was also known for painting people who did not live in stately houses; in the tradition of Velazquez, and Caravaggio, Zoffany painted ... faces. People. Look at the little girl holding the cat.

She is in there, gazing out at us, waiting for Courbet, Manet and other painters who would be able to gaze even more fully back at her.  So, look at these groupings, again, and try not to talk about these paintings with someone ... better yet, go to the Yale Center and see them for me.

Paul Mellon and the Queen's Skirt... and an exception!

We went to the Yale Center for British Art, a compact, but wonderful collection of work from Paul Mellon's collection. We were lucky, someone told us, because there were no large special exhibitions, so more of the collection was on view than is normally the case. And what a collection ...  I took notes and photographs. Back (in this blog, in some detail) on June 7th, I had written about my Queen's skirt theory, where I argue that, often, portrait painters are more taken by the silks, the pearls, the furs, the embroidered details of dress, than they are by the wealthy or royal sitter's face.  And I found a couple of paintings that seemed to confirm my theory, nicely. The first is by Frederick Sandys, from 1866, called "Grace Rose":

She's lovely, but the vase and the roses and her necklace outshine her rather distant expression. Here is another, by Thomas Gainsborough, "Mary Little," from 100 years earlier, in 1763:

Again, lovely, a little more facial activity, but still, look at where he lavishes his attention:

The hand is like marble, perfect, but the poseys and the lace are alive. But, now, for the exception to the rule, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, "Mrs. Robinson," from a few years later, in 1784:

The clothing is, you should pardon the pun, immaterial.  Even the elaborate wig is scrubbed of extra details... what matters is this woman's profile.  She is herself, alone. She lived to be 42, and was painted by everyone .... but this has to be the definitive work. Go and see her. (There are hourly trains from Manhattan to New Haven, and the museum is free).