Little Collage

If someone drew a map of the inside of my brain, I think it would look like this.  Wow.  Looking at this now, I’m wondering if anyone can see where I left my keys?

I made this image by copying a landscape — in a straight forward way — from a book.  Then I tore the image up into little pieces and reassembled them rather haphardly into this arrangement.  Over that, I drew new lines and added some embellishments. 

And I liked it.  Don’t know why.  It just pleases me.  Perhaps it’s because it’s a map of the interior of my brain?  It gives new meaning to the term “interior design.”

[Top of the post:  Little Collage by Aletha Kuschan]

Thinking Big

To enlarge a small, jewel sized non-representational image into something of the scale of this drawing is quite a project.  I had fun.  Pure fun.  The kind of fun children have. The detail that appeared in the previous post comes from this large drawing, that measures 52 1/4 x 60 inches.  It’s based on a little collage (next post) that is half the size of a standard sheet of typing paper. 

[Top of the post:  Large Little Collage by Aletha Kuschan]

Abstracting

I paint things.  But from my earliest recollection of seeing the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, the great American abstract painter of the last generation, I was smitten.  I always loved Richard’s paintings.  It was love at first sight, a love that is still going strong.

When I was coming up, abstraction was considered not merely a given, but was thought to be the form that had forever left representation behind.  That judgment was clearly a bit hasty. And while I never bought into that dogma myself, I think anyone considering the question today can easily see that “representation” is a central facet of human experience and ain’t going anywhere.  But even now the trend watchers will swear that their movement is the wave that washes everything else away.  Not quite.

What struck me about abstraction in my earliest experience being a painter, and which I suspect needs repeating even now, is that all perception is “abstract” in the sense of being partial, evocative and incomplete.  Artists take things apart and reassemble them on the canvas.  In between stages of taking the imagery apart are “abstract,” which is to say they consist of just lines, tones, shapes, colors.  Even in a finished and highly realistic painting, the process of the image is still visible to a discerning viewer.  These marks of the painting-as-painting are abstract elements that separate it from and distinquish it from its real, its actual subject.

How could art not be abstract?  If you paint apples, they are not apples but depictions of apples.  All that is left out by virtue of their being imitations of something is what makes them “abstract.”  Admittedly though, we reserve the word for images that are so removed from sources as to be unidentifiable.  But in truth all art is abstract — only sometimes the artists are the only ones really understanding this.  Realist artists know this better than anybody.

A friend asked me how Diebenkorn chose the framework of his pictures.  Couldn’t he have cropped it anyplace?  Why is the painting this format that it is and not some other?  His questions struck me as incredibly insightful.  Indeed, close observation of Diebenkorn’s surfaces show smaller “versions” or intervals of the same processes and ideas that wash across the whole.  Diebenkorn’s visual ideas are like Chinese nesting boxes or almost-fractals.  In that regard, they have intellectual touchstones amid certain ideas of mathematics and physics!

Aesthetically, what we can take from these questions, I think, is this:  the painting (or drawing) should have a structure that is strong in the parts as well as in the whole.

[Top of the post:  A detail of the author's large abstract crayon drawing.  By Aletha Kuschan]

Little Brown Jug

What a beautiful clay pitcher.  I had forgotten I even owned the jug.  After I found the painting stacked amid other forgotten things in the attic, I went looking for the jug, too.  It’s North Carolina pottery, beautiful, handmade, exquisitely painted and fired.  It must be there, I reasoned.  I painted a picture of it; I must own it.  And sure enough, the pitcher turned up.  In a box, behind something, that was behind something else.

I was immodest in a couple previous posts.  I’ll make amends here.  This painting is useful for criticism.  For the benefit of artists-aspirant, those wishing to learn to paint, those who turn to the “how to paint” books looking for answers, I’ll make an object lesson of myself.  “Object lesson,”  that’s a pun.  Still life.  Object.  Object lesson. Get it?

Okay, I’ll try to leave the humor alone, humorist-aspirant that I am.

We have here a solid, very fundamental ”still life,” the kind of imagery that for many folks, practically defines the genre.  You’ve got all the requisites: beautiful earthenware jug, smaller clayware and two lemons.  They descend in size.  They’re grouped together like a little family of things.  There’s enough overlap of objects to arouse a sense of spatial dimension but not so much as to be “hard.”  The objects are different colors. The light around them has a good tonal range from light to dark.  The lemons have nice “reflected shadows” just like you read about in books.  And the background to the objects is a simple solid color that one can try to blend into ranges of tone to suggest air.  It’s reminiscent enough of Chardin to give it a little art history lift of respectability.

The chief problem, however, is its predictability.  It’s very realistic.  How grand.   And I will give myself brownie points for achieving a this degree of life-likeness, which I was obviously aiming to get.  But whatever that was, the “je ne sais quoi” I claimed for my pictures, that I immodestly praised a post and two ago; well it’s definitely lacking here.  These objects are orphans.  They have no story.  They have no higher purpose.  They are too much art exercise and not enough of life.

Ah, but I’m getting a whiff of a cure on the breeze.  Life breathes in from a window and suggests some possibilities.  The painting is still a painting, regardless of whatever else it might be.  Art for art’s sake to the rescue.  It’s still composed of abstract qualities of line, color, arrangement, tonality, paint texture and so on.  All that I loved about my earlier pochades is available to me here.  I can rework the picture to make the violet-gray of the table top and the yellow-tan of the background become chromatic opposites.  I can get rid of the clear, art school demarcations of the reflected shadow of the lemons, I can integrate the sea green vase to its rich earth grey companion.  There is still hope!

I’ll have to get back to you, but — friends, there’s still hope.  Once I get past my realism exam sensibility, I can start turning this into life and hence into art.  I passed the realism exam, in fact.  And with that accomplishment I can now give myself the freedom to tinker with this.  It’s not a lot that it needs, really.  After all the last coat of paint is the one that counts, and that’s a pretty thin coat to add in this case.

Every space, every centimeter of this picture can be dealt with as a small passage or composition in its own right.  I could become a Jackson Pollack of the realist still life.   Hmm.  Not only can this be painting for painting’s sake, but there can be a thousand little paintings hidden inside the one.  I can go over these appearances like an ant walks confidently across a picnic blanket.  And every bit of it can be “abstract” while every bit of the subject matter stays right there!

[Top of the post:  a student work by the author, Aletha Kuschan]

Whale Whistle

It’s not for calling whales, that’s for sure.  If it is, it doesn’t work.  Because I’ve blown this whistle many times, and no whales ever showed up.  So I take it’s purpose as being to call whales to mind.  It is very good at making one think about whales, this black shiny carved whistle.

I tell people how to paint.  Well, here’s one of my favorite paintings — or one of a type of favorites.  It’s the most unassuming thing, so how shall I presuade you of its merits?   I’m going to be completely immodest and talk about it as though someone else painted it.  Otherwise, I’ll never get to its virtues and no one will understand what’s so wonderful about it. 

It’s part of a long, grand tradition which I have evidently succeeded in joining:  it’s a very fine example of the sensitive minor work.  Its whole character of rough drawing, crude incomplete application of paint, raw summarizing characterization of objects that are rather haphazardly arranged, its humble objects with no strong associations or obvious preciousness — these qualities all mark it as a fast and skillful account of the everyday moment. 

The artist has arrived home, taken off her hat, has hastily assembled some ordinary yet charming objects, plops down at her easel and begins to paint with easy skill and distinctly quotidian sensibilities.  The bottle is transparent, yet the artist has taken few pains to tell it.  The whale whistle is picturesque and we can make it out to be quite fishy, yet it’s painted in simple, loosely stroked shades of black and gray.  The deep red cloth has a few, quickly rendered folds.  The little white milk pitcher is boldly out of proportion, yet our art appreciation class sensibilities assure us she painted it so deliberately.  It’s a homey, middle class La Bohemian view. 

Here is an unabashed pochade, the kind of aestheticist picture that artists make for their own pleasure, a real painter’s painting.  This little picture likes being about paint as much as it likes being about life.

[Top of the post:  Little Pochade by yours truly.  Aletha Kuschan]