Two days of seeing far-away horizons...

and here is another drawing, coming out of a dream:

"I call it death-in-ife and life-in-death"

Yeats wrote, in his poem, Byzantium... The line kept running through my head as I drew this afternoon:

next version, 18 x 24": juxtaposing....

More than handfuls ...

of freshly-shelled peas, wooden deck squares, and crushed clam shells used as gravel...

Two sketches, one "real" and one virtual....

The first picture, the "real" sketch, is a wet wash on paper that is clearly meant to remain dry... the virtual version below that comes from iPad Brushes. Both are working towards the next painting, in what I am thinking of as the "juxtaposition" series...

Silks up against grass ...

Here is a newer version of the painting, following the indications from yesterday's iPad sketch:

Will sleep on it...

la prochaine visite guidée (the next guided tour)

I took a photograph of the painting I am working on -- the one about juxtapositions, borrowing the standout shape from the other day's model and her long dress ("Silks up against grass," from the June 21 post) -- and sent it to my iPad, and worked on it there in the Brushes application. Here is the version from this morning's session;  the digital scribbles are clear, here, in a way they won't be in "actual" paint:

So now, it's up to me to work this out in non-virtual form... coming soon...

Grids and Layers...

Rosalind Krauss is visiting ... via 2 of her books. I have a feeling she will be here for a long time, as she has a good deal to say.

  

In the first chapter of Originality, Krauss discusses grids (does the grid by each artist cut off -- or contain -- the world?), and reproduces work by Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Caspar David Friedrich, Odilon Redon, Piet Mondrian, and Joseph Cornell.  I once attended a lecture by an artist who said that he always knew that when he was reading theory, the studio work was not going well; "fiction," he said, "means it's a go." But ... I like reading theory! Krauss's grids are everywhere for me at the moment; here is a screen in Essex, Connecticut:

Then the question of layers ... I read an article today by Simon Abrahams, who writes the blog at "Every Painter Paints Himself." The article discusses two paintings by Manet ("Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe" and "Mlle. V in the Costume of an Espada"), centering on the question of the different picture planes, and the different types of brushwork in each work. Read the article; here is the short version: http://www.everypainterpaintshimself.com/essays/manets_le_dejeuner_and_mlle._v._simply_explained/   The article is of a piece with his website, which also, by the way, has a splendid gallery of images, arranged alphabetically by painter.

And here is a close-up of a layered work I am just starting:

Silks up against grass

I was struck by a photograph (Jean Patchett, photographed by Norman Parkinson) from 1950, a model, turning away from the camera.  No-one sits this way, in a dress this elaborate, unless ... for art. Some words come to mind: incongruity, juxtaposition, here and there, yes and no, or, perhaps, a simple phrase: my love is like a red, red rose.  Kenneth Burke said, in A Grammar of Motives, that "metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the this-ness of that, or the that-ness of this."

This indoor, reflective, fabric-centered shot, which I have painted over, needed to be contrasted with a bit of still life, a bit of landscape, a bit of "that-ness."  Here is a two-piece drawing, then:

"A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound..."

said Wallace Stevens, beginning "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas."  And I quote him because I have just destroyed a painting (see photo of the poor thing, below), so I will think now of the next one, as I remember that I have, instead of a good painting, at the very least made "a brilliant sound":

on "Waiting for the Moon"

It's a lovely little film (that just happened to win the 1987 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Drama) directed by Jill Godmilow about the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.  The booklet that comes with the movie traces down which scenes and people are fictional -- or have been toyed with -- and which bits of the story are facts.  The film looks over a period of about three months in (roughly) 1936, with Stein and Toklas moving between Rue de Fleurus in Paris and their country house, in Bilignin. The women who play Stein and Toklas are tender and wonderful... Linda Hunt plays an agreeable (but buttoned-up) Toklas, and Linda Bassett a smiling, patient but rather private Stein. Both actors ease you into their portrayals and invite you into this very inventive, quirky, writer-and-editor's world.  The film is for sale at the Contemporary Jewish Museum ("Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories" is there until September 6).  Definitely worth an evening! And we have, just for today, my photograph of the house in Bilignin, in the Department of the Ain, rented for all those years by Stein and Toklas, photographed from below:

And now, for "Waiting," a small Bilignin-inspired sketch:

"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?

" ... tell why the glassy lights..."

Collaged draft of oyster, grid, girl, Queen's skirt, Benday Dot, Santa Fe... as I explained yesterday, maybe not an entire "inventory," but a reflection of what's on my mind today...

".... The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night."
                               --from Wallace Stevens's "Idea of Order at Key West"