Artist's Statement IX: double vision and the Bowerbird

So, the second paragraph of my working draft (of my artist's statement) reads like this :

"My work may be strongest when it contains contradictions.  Van Gogh spoke about this: “it is as though one dreamed twice, in two registers … the simplest image is doubled: it is itself and something other than itself.”  I paint here and there, foreground and background. The work is still, but it often refers to movement. I have long described myself as an abstract landscape painter, but I am beginning to draw and paint faint odalisques in those shimmering landscapes.  I paint the world I know against the world I imagine."

I run everything I write by my husband, and he read this and said "can you elaborate?"

Okay, so here is a totally different run at the question:

"The 'Odalisque Series' that I am working on now begins with a base abstract work.  For two or three paintings, I began with a work that I had painted months before and re-painted over parts of the piece, or scraped down portions of paint or collage, diminishing but not erasing the original painting.  Other works have begun with a painting that was painted specifically as a base. The nudes --- taken from well-known works by Ingres, Van Gogh or Matisse, for example, or sketched from life -- are then outlined and painted over the base, lightly, usually in a pale white (or peach or blue).  Then the two parts of the work need to be reconciled, and that takes the most concentration, really.  I have found that I like the contradictions in this work: the figure and ground, the color and line, the figure and the abstract, the studio model (here) and a landscape foreign to her (there).  Van Gogh wrote that an interesting challenge for an artist might be: "if, while painting a cottage, he dreams of a nest. It is as though one dreamed twice, in two registers ... the simplest image is doubled: it is itself and something other than itself."  I am following his suggestion and taking it a step further by revealing both images in paint.  I am also taking Francis Bacon's idea of the moving figure, twisted and heavily colored, against a plain ground, and reversing it, so that the image is plain and the ground shimmers and moves.  This is, I think, a true measure of the way we see the world. I paint the world I know against the world I imagine, and this duality has a real power, I believe."

Better?

And, now, for the artist's statement of the Bowerbird. The male Bowerbird of New Guinea and Australia builds a bower to attract a mate; these are not little round nests, but elaborate structures, sometimes two parallel walls, sometimes curved branches that create a roof. The Bowerbird may "paint" the bower with mud, and he distributes shells, flowers, leaves, and any colored found objects around it. Some bowerbirds can also mimic sounds, like the speech of humans or the sounds of a waterfall.

Here is a photograph of a Satin Bowerbird's bower, from Barry Hatton:

And here is another photo, this from Matt Webster, of a Greater Bowerbird bower:

You should also take a look at a video by Josep del Hoyo, from October 2010, filmed in Lamington National Park in Queensland, Australia:

http://ibc.lynxeds.com/video/satin-bowerbird-ptilonorhynchus-violaceus/close-adult-male-painting-bower-using-beak-applying-

Artist's Statement VIII: "something is created there all by itself..."

So, again, still, I am working through drafts of an artist's statement and I talk about intention and contradictions and influences ... but I haven't mentioned process. And I was looking at some artwork and realizing that process has to be included. The work of painting is not simply an achievement or what it looks like when it's perfect. What gets us started? What does the middle of the process feel like? When do we stop?

So, beginnings. Richard Sigmund uses what he calls the "art of the streets" to get him thinking. But he doesn't seem to mean graffiti. He means the way the traffic signs are painted on the asphalt, or the way the water runs along a gully on black pavements. Sigmund starts by "supporting an optimism, by trying to raise something common into an art world which rewards uniqueness. I am trying to view what we have in our life with an elevated light, to appreciate what we have ... I believe this could possibly bring relief."  If we can all see it, and we can all know it, we might come to appreciate the little things (also, I have to add, a Richard Foreman idea ... bring forth the undervalued and give it a place).  Sigmund says about starting off the actual work that "I make the stretcher, gesso it, and normally get my idea down. This is when the painting starts, as I need to resolve unforeseen problems. I paint until it doesn't present any problems." [I like that. Me, too]. Here is his "Pacific Coast Highway," 1984:

It's something we all recognize, and even the scale is "right," and yet, here, it is beautiful.

Okay, for middles. The artist Alexis Brown was interviewed; the film is posted on "Gorky's Granddaughter" (great site, filled with artists, studios, talk).  She works with screen printing and with the plastic plates used to test lithographic prints (a new, but "unstable" process that she is testing).  Brown starts the interview by showing us vultures and swans and says she wants to make some connections between them.  The interviewer gestures at some really interesting, but less recognizable, patterns on the wall and notes that as Brown overlays prints,  these patterns get going, and "it becomes this cloud of energy." Brown says in response that "It's closeted abstraction .... I really like the smoky effect .... I am taking guesses at my own actions or why I do these things." That's what we do, I think, as we paint; we stop, and look, and try and figure out what we are doing and where the work is going. It's hard, Brown admits, to come up with the same image twice, in the layered "clouds": "these effects are completely uncontrolled."  But they are compelling. Here is a work that shares some characteristics with the one the artist was talking about: "Untitled" from 2010, pronto plate and charcoal.

And, a bit more about process, from Gerhard Richter.  He has moved through so many different styles and subjects! I confess that I really, really love these new (and enormous) abstracts. The film recording his painting process, at the Tate Modern, showed him pulling paint across with large and small scrapers, horizontally or vertically. (And, somehow, he does this dressed in black -- and remains impeccable).  I liked each stage of the work he was over-scraping, and kept getting worried that he would lose it by doing too much.  But he has his own method for knowing when a work is complete. In a 1999 interview, Richter explained why there were no representational works (in the group of small watercolors then on show): "Because it is more exciting with the abstract ones, and it goes faster .... something is created there all by itself, which one only has to observe in order to intervene at the right moment -- in that case, to stop it."  And here is one of his "scraped" abstracts:

Picasso used to say that a painting is never really finished.  How do you know when your paintings are completed?

Artist's Statement IV: "...into the midst of the heretofore rejected (non-beautiful, un-interesting, clichéd, etc.)..."

There are two kinds of artist's statements; the first presents the artist's general approach, developed over time (Cézanne's claim that "I don't think of anything when I paint") and then the artist's specific preoccupations of the moment (Constable's "I have done a good deal of skying -- for I am determined to conquer all difficulties").  At the moment, I am considering the specifics as I work on my odalisques.  And, in the main, I have a foreground/background (also known as figure/ground) question.

Richard Foreman gives me the place to start. He says he writes plays that he would like to see onstage, and he also has said that he does not want very much "story" in his work, because people fall asleep: "What this amounts to is a DECISION to view non-beautiful material in such a way that what was foreground is now background .... and the desired beauty is then projected, as the creative act, into the midst of the heretofore rejected (non-beautiful, un-interesting, clichéd, etc. ..."  So we reverse figure and ground. And we do not fall asleep!

Here is the simplest foregrounded subject, a detail from "The Blue Crab," by Ferdinand Bauer, from approximately 1810:

We have nothing else to look at but the subject, the figure; the crab is laid out upon a totally white ground. It is a specimen. The background is irrelevant; in fact, there is nothing there, which is too bad, because if we replaced the crab in its context, the seashore's sands and rocks and seaweeds would be beautiful to see.

Francis Bacon believes in the figure and the foreground, and in pushing away the background almost entirely. Against the most passive and pale -- or un-identifiably bland -- backgrounds, his figures twist and turn, the faces are contorted, pained, unstable.  Look at this center panel from the triptych "Three Portraits," 1973, apparently a self-portrait:

Bacon worked from photographs that had sometimes already been mangled; the faces, and the bodies, were the thing for him, the only thing. I think he believed that the viewer might stand long enough before the painting to put the sitter's face back into some recognizable form, and that, in the process, we might see our confrontation with these distortions as the point.  He was a "foreground" man.

But, I really love Foreman's idea. Why can't we switch the foreground and background, and bring the viewer's gaze to a new place? I think that emotion can not always be seen in a person's face or demeanor, but instead we can sense it in the surrounding air, the sidewalks, the windowsill, the forest ... wherever the setting might be.  The figure -- the blue crab, or Bacon's self-portrait -- may not be the thing we should concentrate on.  Let's imagine, with Foreman, that it's the context that is important.

So here is an unlikely co-conspirator: Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).  Friedrich's figures are inside the sublime. In this painting, called "The Wanderer above the Mists," the man, were we to cut him out and place him in the library of a club of his time in London, would be totally at home; he is impeccably dressed and unremarkable in himself. The man, the "figure" does not matter as much as the "ground," his context here; the painter has focused on the ice, the mist, the rocks, the mountains ... the "background" is here the foreground, the real subject:

The mountains in the distance are impossibly far and forbidding, as is the abyss before our lone figure.  The abyss matters. This is, of course, the forbidding Romantic idea of the Sublime, before which the poets and painters stood in awe. (See Wordsworth's "The Prelude" for more!). The place, the indifferent powerful world of Nature, the "ground," was the point, and not the "figure" standing before it.

Artists and their audiences "see" better when they pick up the figure's context and use it. I think that blank, open figures in a complicated space might allow us to project and imagine, particularly if we are looking at odalisques. The pale odalisque that Gerome painted in "The Moorish Bath" (my November 11 post) is in a context that matters... can we think our way inside?

So, "to illustrate my last remark," here is a detail of my painting "The River," a nude in a new context:

Artist's Statement III: Male and Female Odalisques Up Against "A Good Fight"

The poet Frank Bidart wrote that "whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within me as I die, dies with me."  Things must be said, must be remembered, and must be carried on. If we cannot exactly retrieve everything from the vaults of what has gone before us, we can at least look for the fragments we have.

I have always liked the work of Jean-Léon Gérome (1824-1904). His Orientalist work inspired me to look further into the world of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century odalisque. Sometimes his images are quite disconcerting -- the naked backside of a young boy, who is painted as a snake-charmer, or the naked bodies of slaves for sale in the bazaars he imagined -- but the most peculiar, so strange, so smooth, so accomplished and yet, who can tell what it says, is this painting in the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, "The Moorish Bath," from 1890:

The two women's bodies are beautiful, one muscular, one improbably soft; there are no faces here, only skin, water, and tiles from North Africa.  I should like to have asked Gérome about this work, about his models, his intended audience, whether there was a narrative to be discovered here, and how that woman is balanced on that tiny tile shelf ... I have not found any such statement from him. But his legacy included two students, both born in 1844, both dead-serious artists who could not be more different: Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt.

Eakins would write that he did not like all the excuses -- perhaps his teacher's among them -- for painting unrealistic nude women, women without pubic hair or wrinkles or flaws, all those "smiling smirking goddesses," he called them.  Eakins said that a naked woman was "the most beautiful thing there is -- except a naked man, but I never saw a study of one exhibited."  His work included portraits, interiors, subjects grouped in outdoor settings with the light of New England or a French city precisely captured; it is believed that he used projected photographs to help him sketch the outlines for some of his paintings. He was after technical mastery. Eakins would work his way around to those nude studies of men, something that had been common in classical statuary but had not commonly been seen in oils. Eakins was commissioned to paint "The Swimming Hole," (1883-5), but on its completion, the client refused it, and it remained unsold until 1925. Eakins wrote that  "I see no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature's works, the naked figure .... My conscience is clear, and my suffering is past."

He would not say much more (that I could find) about the nature of his work; he did say that "For the public I believe my life is all in my work." The painting of these male odalisques, caught up in their conversations and play and swimming, with a self-portrait of Eakins in the lower right-hand corner, accomplish a strange duality: a realistic idyll.

And then there is Gérome's other famous student, Mary Cassatt. She was born in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, and she would travel back and forth to Europe until finally settling there in 1874. Cassatt's father despaired of her; he said he would rather "see her dead" than see her be an artist.  During one of her involuntary trips back to Pennsylvania, in 1871, Cassatt wrote to her friend Emily Sartain that "I need to see you and talk about art. I cannot tell you what I suffer for want of seeing a good picture." Degas had seen her work and befriended her.  Cassatt had had some early successes at the Paris Salon, but after a summary rejection there, she would begin to exhibit with the impressionists, the only American to do so.  Degas had said that "it is essential to do the same subject over and over again, ten times, a hundred times," and Cassatt, like Jane Austen, painted and re-painted women in the world she knew.  Unlike Eakins, Cassatt would not undress her subjects; she drew the faces in the light. Here is her "Five O'Clock Tea," from 1880:

The bodies are crowded onto what looks like a small armchair -- I should like to ask about that! -- but the faces are the faces of real people.  The woman in profile, buttoned up as she is, has far more in common with Eakins's young men than with Gérome's odalisques. There is a striving for realism here, even down to the flourishes of the tea service, which seem to counter-balance the women, to weigh them down by possessions.  Despite giving up any idea of family, Cassatt sometimes found herself balancing "house-keeping, painting and oyster-frying," saying late in life that "I work and that is the whole secret of anything like content in life in life, when everything else is gone."

She would say that "I have not done what I wanted to, but I have tried to make a good fight." And we can ask only that ...

"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.

Tension, the artist's statement, and the painting "At the Milliner's"

The painting is from 1881, by Eduoard Manet, and only appeared after his death. It had been completed, and remained in his studio, for two years. Unusual. The painting is now part of the collection at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, where we saw it last weekend.  It is quite striking, a gorgeous display of Manet's mastery of dark-upon-dark color against a smaller set of lights; here is my photograph of the painting:

Manet gave the same title to at least two other works, a pastel and a print, which could confuse the scholarship a bit, but I have not seen any detailed discussion of this work, even on the museum's own website (which also just posted this piece today).  I would like to know more; I would like to be seated in the studio, asking Manet any number of questions. He would have been open to inquiry, I think;  he wrote a friend: "Please be good enough to come by the studio one of these afternoons -- I would hope to be there, but if by chance I am not take my key from the concierge."  Once we were seated, I would have mentioned that --  I feel that the a-symmetrical pull of the figure, that she is looking into so much space, means that this might have been part of a larger group scene.  Was it? Or is this a kind of "sketch"? Is the look on her face one of contentment? Ennui? Indecision? There is a combination of fluidity and specificity in the background wallpaper; how did you decide to leave the work in such a divided state? How did the perfect outline of the line of her back come to be? How did you see this as fitting in with the Bar at the Folies-Bergere, painted only a few months before?

In short, I'd like to see an artist's statement.

I do realize that is not going to happen. But after walking through a number of galleries yesterday, and reading many statements, I keep thinking, "what if?" What if I could ask Roy Lichtenstein about this print:

It is called "Seascape," and it is from the "Landscape Series," from 1985. I would ask ... what made Lichtenstein combine the meticulous lines with the gestural brushstrokes?  Where did the rust colors come from? And, again, where does this piece fit in with the living rooms and their windows, and with the Cezanne-ian landscapes of the later years (see my October 29 post) ... ?

Some artists do give us articulate, if all-too-brief, statements. Jasper Johns has said "Do something. Do something to that. And then do something to that."  But ---  how did he get to that?

Helen Frankenthaler told Henry Geldzahler (Artforum, 4., no.2, October 1965, p.37) that she remembered, clearly, how she had decided upon her artistic direction, despite coming of age in a time of (almost) too many possible influences: "De Kooning made enclosed linear shapes and 'applied' the brush.  Pollock used shoulder and ropes and ignored the edges and the corner.  I felt I could stretch more in the Pollock framework .... You could become a de Kooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock." I love Helen Frankenthaler.  How wonderful is her explanation?

So, artists' statements might base themselves on tension. Artistic tension, that is, not the kind that resides in your shoulder-blades.  Frankenthaler mentioned once (to Gene Baro, in "The Achievement of Helen Frankenthaler," in Art International, September 20, 1967, p. 36) that she knew a painting worked, for her, when she sensed that it was "a play of ambiguities," what she called, in another interview, the "active" role of "negative" space up against the "positive." 

And, if we think about it, that's where the Manet painting wins us over, and that's where the Lichtenstein breaks through.  Two things, at gentle war with one another, confined in a small space.  I saw many statements yesterday that indicated that the artists in question had come to accept a certain duality in their work: opposites such as high and low, painting and photography, line and color all vie for attention. And should.  I find this idea quite reassuring as I go about adding my odalisques to my abstractions.  It's the tension, really. Keep those statements coming.