Reality lurking inside spaces

A friend and I had a disagreement about what art is.  She said, “Art is not always about painting a pretty picture or giving people a pleasant tune. Art must be free to convey the gamut of emotions, including the ones that make us uncomfortable.”  We weren’t really disagreeing about art, it was something else.  But I was struck by this claim which one hears everywhere.

There is nothing controversial about what she said, so far as it goes.  I think of Rembrandt’s Blinding of Samson.  (Ouch.  That’s gotta hurt.)  But this oft repeated formula has morphed into something about which we should be very suspicious.  That art is sometimes about “uncomfortable things” has developed an equals sign.   It’s become serious art = edgy/shocking/uncomfortable/indecent/violent/fill in negative value here.

Umm, I just don’t think so.  True, nature is sometimes tooth and claw, but it’s also fields of daisies and sometimes it’s hamsters.  As I wrote in the previous post, mathematicians find that nature leans toward the aesthetic.  When it became fashionable to question whether beauty was necessary, somebody forgot to do the math — which is to say, no one said, “hold on there, not so fast, since when is creating beauty easy?  Indeed, are we sure we even know what beauty IS?”

I find that painting a pretty picture is so darned difficult — I want to ask what sort of thing beauty is — how does one recognize it?  You can respond to beauty in things and have beauty resist you to the nth degree when once you attempt to catch its likeness.  Beauty is still a high calling.  It’s still a hard gig to get.  Many try, few succeed.  It’s Everest.  It’s a mirage.  It’s a dream that fades upon waking.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again–

Caliban does himself fit perfectly into the art=ugliness formula but his cry, his dream, that’s all gauzy beauty-and-splendor floating in one’s gaze.  When I look at my koi, I am stalking beauty.  I know it’s out there in the world somewhere.  I intend to persist.  I will relentlessly search.  The fishes have hid it around the edges of their shapes and inside the spaces that separate them from each other.  Sometimes it peeks out from the corner where one shape intrudes upon another.  Sometimes it catches you between layers of paint, between this-that-was-a-mistake and this-that-I-painted-above.  In the lines, in the color patches, in the differences between big and little, in the topography of ideas and forms, beauty lives.

Like a hamster hidden inside a pile of wood shavings, like the most commonplace flower, like the plain daylight streaming, like the gnats hanging in the air, like so many other quite ordinary and decent and indifferent experiences, beauty lifts its head and gazes out into one’s face.  I’m still going out on a limb, and I’ll define “art” as the electric and ephemeral contact with reality that happens by chance and by desire.  Before I lumber off in search of edginess, I will stake my claim on ordinariness.

It’s hard to accept that somehow we trump reality.

Learning Beauty

My kid had math homework this weekend that she didn’t know how to do, and since she hadn’t brought her textbook home, she lacked instructions and definitions to help guide her back toward the path.  Unfortunately, while being a rational enough gal, I have no talent for numbers or numerical relationships.  Dad is good at math, but he happened not to be available at the height of the crisis.  The homework consisted of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative numbers.  I vaguely recalled that rules exist, but couldn’t remember what they are.  So I suggested to my daughter that she experiment — perform some different approaches and see what results she got, and from those results have a guess at which rule is “it.”

She wouldn’t.  And so I pulled Music of the Primes off the shelf and started reading.  Music of the Primes is Math, the Movie — or an elegant, suspense-filled heart-tugging page turner of a math adventure book.  Yes, I know that’s hard to believe but tis true.  Math made thrilling for folks like me and thee.  Math the dream.  Math the you-should-have-been-there experience.

Unfortunately, Music of the Primes wasn’t working for her.  Too grown-uppy.  And by sixth grade a certain sense of, shall I call it, false reality sets in and a child gets mislead into supposing that “the answers” are out there sitting on a drab shelf ready to be innocently “learned” at the public school house.  I cannot blame my kid for having internalized this sensibility; it’s been drummed into her for years now.

Given the data available at the start of the nineteenth century, Legendre’s function was much better than Gauss’s formula as an approximation to the number of primes up to some number N, but the appearance of the rather ugly correction term 1.08366 made mathematicians believe that something better and more natural must exist to capture the behaviour of the prime numbers.

Such ugly numbers may be commonplace in other sciences, but it is remarkable how often the mathematical world favours the most aesthetic possible construction.  As we shall see, Riemann’s Hypothesis can be interpreted as an example of a general philosophy among mathematicians that, given a choice between an ugly world and an aesthetic one, Nature always chooses the latter.  [my emphasis] It is a constrant source of amazement for most mathematicians that mathematics should be like this, and explains why they so often get wound up about the beauty of their subject.

Imagine that: choosing a mathematical order — a beautiful one over the ugly alternatives — that in math one can sketch out ideas and test them, and even choose among them using an intuition that surprisingly sometimes matches the visible natural order.  In so many spheres of life we are offered chances to choose, to act, to inquire boldly, to investigate, to discover.  Oh would that we could instill even a nano-quantity of that free-spiritedness into the school house!

Above, Alice has boldy chosen to paint a dog leaping.  She has no qualms at all about portraying her Public Enemy Number One.  And she even makes him beautiful.

Chiaroscuro shell

Today was a loose ends kind of day.  Did a little of this, little of that, but had few chances to do a sustained bit of anything.  Except I made this drawing.  Pencil is such a moody, smudgy medium.  Shiny too.  Have to love the way that graphite gives off light as well as absorbs it.

The shell, too, reflected my thoughts back to me as well as absorbed some of them.  The beauty of drawing is the way it lets your mind drift off to lazy, limitless, meditative places.

My lament

I was telling a friend of mine last week, as we strolled through the National Gallery of Art, how much I missed my old friend Titian.   His painting Venus Blindfolding Cupid has been taken off regular view ever since somebody decided that it’s not a real Titian.  The theme is ironic.  Love, blind.  Well, I’d say that some of the Italian curators are have a little vision problem too.  It’s such an incredibly beautiful painting.  Interesting to compare with its counterpart in Italy.  (The image exists in a different version across the pond, probably one reason that the authenticity of the NGA picture is doubted.) 

Alas.  Well, thinking about it got me in motion.  I went digging around looking for a reproduction of the image so I could look at it.  And I made the quick drawing above.  Became quite captivated by the face — which is more ordered than the face of the Italian picture.  Quite possibly the NGA version might be painted by another artist — I’m not saying it’s not.  But it’s such a beautiful painting.  Can’t it be enjoyed simply for what it is?  For its own loveliness?

Fast Landscape

During the last several months my schedule has become one of almost constant interruption so I’ve been tinkering constantly with ways of trying to hold onto ideas.  Last paintings that I tried stalled because just as I get “fired up” I have to stop and turn my attention elsewhere.  For a time I was hardly painting, taking refuge in drawing (admittedly NOT a bad refuge) and other things (reading, study).

Well, I still have a large partly begun canvas on the easel — and I’m NOT giving up on it.  Far from it.  But I did sit myself down one day and gave myself a heart-to-heart talking to (I find that an integrated personality is highly over-rated).  I decided — or me, myself, and I decided — that any painting is better than none.

What’s more I have tons of materials left over from some old projects that I no longer need for their original intended use.  I decided that I was going to crank out something.  Whatever it was, some of it was going to be fast and free.

It’s better to be painting than not painting.  It is better to be making line and color decisions than no decisions at all.  I decided that I’d rifle through old photos — better working from photos than not working at all — and I was going to paint whatever I could — whatever I wanted to — I was throwing caution to the winds.

Needless to say, I’m beginning to really have fun.  And I’m getting more jealous of my painting time than formerly.  Sometimes I’ve got fifteen minutes.

By golly, I whip out the brushes.  Fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes!

Abstraction

What people call abstraction is not really abstraction.  People think that it’s a genre in art and its opposite is “representation” (a term that had to be invented once abstraction became a trend).  Abstraction is merely a giving over to perception.  A pure visual data that comes into our eyes via the optic nerve exists for us only as an notion of possibility.  No one really knows what uncoded vision might be.  By the time we are able to speak, we have already also learned to see, and things are things.  Once you can give a thing a name, you’ve made it possible to ignore much of what it looks like.  Artists, however, are people who make the trip back into perception.  Yet even an artist cannot see things deprived of their thingness.  Our brains shape the world prior to our awareness in ways we can barely imagine. 

Children imitate speech before learning their language.  They get the rhythm and sound out with something that almost passes for English, or French, or Chinese, or whatever — only it lacks a clear vocabulary!  I think to some extent children express bits of pre-vision also even as they are learning to see — or learning to see while defining more and more of the world in words.  I gave my daughter a paint brush at a very early age, and she did more than “just scribble.”

I found a logic and rigor in her first paintings.  And they are not devoid of “representation.”  When she could talk she used to tell me what was inside her pictures, and there were always things.  A child’s “abstraction” is only apparent to outsiders.  A world of things lies hidden inside the marks. 

A true abstraction has nothing to do with whether objects are recognizable in a realistic way.  Ingres’s paintings and drawings are full of the most beautiful abstractions.  Before they are things, his lines are pure lines.  Their lyricism and sinuousity stands apart from a mere rendering.  All the greatest works of art have a visual logic that resides deep inside the image, really at its core.  Thus to endow a picture of something with a vivid abstraction is merely to bring back into it the immediacy of living perception.

[Top of the post:  A picture of something by the author's kid at age three]

Red Idea

Sometimes I use a computer to get ideas, as here where a collage of images has been alterred in lots of fun ways.  I use things like this as sources from which to draw and paint.  It’s then that I fiddle around with the image using my own computer (the one between my ears).

Koi on the Move

I’d like to go to the beach for real.  Or I’d like to dive into a pond somewhere with my friends the koi.  Can’t do either of these things right now.  Well, actually I can’t try door number two ever — unless I’m willing to get arrested by the National Park Service.  But I am up to my eyeballs in water.  And I’m not referring to my afternoon at the pool. 

I’ve been working on koi paintings.  Will be making drawings of koi, too, because painting takes too long and I need instant gratification.  I remember how much I enjoyed making the drawing above, which is fairly large, made on two sheets measuring 60 x 88 inches overall.  I have an idea for a new koi drawing so I’m beside myself with eagerness to get started.  At some future time, I’ll post them.  But for now I present these little teasers!

Work of this sort has its own frustrations, of course.  “Painting” with crayons means having to scribble or rub colors into shapes.  The upside is that it’s very energetic and provides good exercise for the forearms.  Whatever frustrations to instant gratification exist, however, are more than made up by the delight in making lines.  Lots of ‘em — over very large sheets of paper.  It’s great to be an adult and still have so much rationalization for long episodes of play.

[Top of the post:  Last year's Koi drawing, by Aletha Kuschan, crayon on Canson paper]

Mirrors into Thought

I’m busy painting koi these days, doing my own version of Monet’s Nympheas idea, living as it were in imaginary pools of water, becoming it sometimes seems a fish myself, so immersed I am in a world of blue.  So, it’s intriguing to reencounter a work like this drawing of flowers and to find so many similarities in it to the fishes and the pool. 

Though the colors are entirely different and the associations are quite opposite, this picture bears a mirror likeness to the koi ponds.  This similarity is made all the more mysterious by their oppositions.  One takes place outdoors, the other inside the house.  One is natural, the other is civilized and artificial.  One is vertical, the other horizontal.  But inside both pictures are formal means of ordering the visual idea.  Both images have a “swirl” of sorts as its schematic center.  The implicit visual movement of the flowers in their design, both the flowers in the vase and the ones arranged on the design of the cloth, echo the swimming motions of the fish in their pond. 

I’ve noticed this kind of visual metaphor before in my paintings.  I have no idea what it means.  Beneath the subject matter lies a process of ordering and arranging that is as much the subject of the painting as are the objects depicted.  Somehow in the precise ways I order things, my personality lies hidden. 

It might seem that a person’s way of ordering ideas would be the last thing about themselves that they would “hide,” and yet I only discover these facts of self-hood for myself by this very indirect means.  And without even realizing I was doing so, naturally I reveal something of myself to others also by these tacit devices.

We project ourselves outwards upon the world in myriad ways.  Just that sense one has of knowing people, of taking the measure of them, even of people that we just meet when we make those crucial “first impression” judgements — all these effects are signs of the self that is foisted out.  Even a shy self is thrust onto the stage of life despite one’s efforts to seek shelter. 

We are all actors on the stage as William Shakespeare once keenly observed.  For the artist the picture is but another kind of garment one wears to demonstrate and manifest the self to the world.

A picture is a strange mirror because it distorts as much as it reveals, pressing ideas outward into the world in a thousand disguises.  Yet behind all forms of concealment, one person peeks through.  Paint.  Do paint, and I guarantee you’ll gain self-knowledge though you may not always recognize the face you see in painting’s strange mirror.
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[Top of the post:  Drawing of Flowers in a Vase, by Aletha Kuschan, Caran d'ache on Canson paper]

Stream of Consciousness

And this is the stream of consciousness!