School’s Out (soon)

The third grade at my kid’s school has been drawing cakes.  And you can tell from the cakes what some of the children are thinking.  “School is almost over!”  And “cake,” of course, “is good.”

Hands On

Here’s the next sequence in the series of posts whose goal is to move from a false idea of art into a true one.  I had used poor Ellsworth Kelly as my whipping boy in a post written months ago.  Finding that the Kelly post received lots of views from readers looking specifically for information about him, I decided that I could use Kelly’s example of anti-art to teach visitors something about the nature of genuine art.  To  get the benefit of the whole argument, one needs to consult earlier posts.  However, this post begins in medius res.

Here are simple squares.  It harks back to an exercise I used once while teaching an art camp to a group of mostly 10 to 14 year-old boys.  The idea came to me from my desperation since these energetic boys were driving me bonkers.  I needed something to calm their dynamism and thought that a ten minute session spent doing something quietly repetitious might be just the ticket.  All I asked them to do was draw a sequence of squares and fill each square with a solid color. 

To my great surprise, ten minutes drifted into twenty minutes then into thirty minutes.  I told them we had to finish up and was greeted with lamentful moaning, “please — just a little more time!”  I couldn’t believe it.  What was even more wonderful was to observe that each kid had turned this seemingly robot task into evidence of individual temperament.  Each drawing was different. 

Before switching to our next topic, I first collected all the drawings and gathered the kids round in a circle in a dark corridor outside our classroom (hoping that dimness would hold them in their quiet mood).  I displayed each drawing one by one, asking the author to raise a hand.  Each kid readily found his own drawing for there were no two alike.

The first “gesture” of art is the introduction of the individual into it.  Even something as simple as drawing squares can unmask the self. 

The fact that one physically draws the squares also holds great significance.  To draw squares this way was like learning to write letters of an alphabet. It’s not a great achievement, but it can be a first step toward marvellous possibility.

I use the idea of “drawing squares” because it has so much structure and seems like the very opposite of “creativity.”  Indeed, I think that Kelly’s kind of art hinges on mindless sterility in that he produces a manufactured kind of image and makes it “art” by affixing his name to it and charging large sums of money for it (which quite strangely he has succeeded in getting).

But the simple art of the hand does not gain or lose in virtue by the vagaries of monetary value that society attaches to it.  This first exercise of squares consists merely in making lines, in rubbing down color, in choosing colors, all through which one catches the sense that colors have great innate beauty and can become emblems of mood or state of mind simply by virtue of their powerful combinations.

Meanwhile the role of the hand — the drawing something by hand — even something as simple as these squares — it’s here that both accident and serendipity creep into view.  And the memory of the hand — we begin to realize that the physical memory of gesture is different from yet related to sight.

More squares evolving in the next post. Come visit my store on CafePress!

Square Made More Complicated

To fully appreciate what’s going on here you have to begin with the post about Ellsworth Kelly that I posted here, and work forwards.

Using the same hardware paint sample squares, I’ve taken and covered some of the interior colors up with other squares, layering them in various ways.  The result produces rectangles of many shapes, strong contrasts between light and dark and/or warm and cool colors, and narrow vertical bands of color that play off against the bulkier more squarish shapes.  The final image is produced in a camera. I just arrange the squares and then unarrange them — which means that the great work of art thus produced is forever lost to those high-rolling collectors who might have desired to own them.  Que sera sera.  (I’ll be happy, of course, to reproduce any of these on commission.  The price for one of these better-than-Ellsworth-Kelly pieces is only 8 million dollars.  Quite a bargain.  That’s half what one pays for a Damien Hirst.)

Anyway, since the image exists chiefly in the camera’s digital memory and upon your computer screen, it means that it can be manipulated in one’s software.  I rotated the image until I found the orientation I liked best.  One could also reverse it, change the colors and jazz it up in lots of ways, playing to one’s heart’s content.

And I hope your heart is content.  However, I think your hands should have something useful to offer as well.  The next image will take us back into the mists of time to when people made things by hand.  Or back to memories of kindergarten.  Same thing.  Children are savages.  But they can teach us all the savage pleasures, such as crayoning and drawing for the pure joy of it.

So, next post.  The plot thickens.  Remember, we’re on a journey looking for “real art.” Come visit my store on CafePress!

Children are not fashionable

When I was a kid, I remember there was a season during which this was my favorite painting.  Memory is fickle, of course.  I don’t know whether the season of my enthusiasm lasted a week or an afternoon.  I also don’t recall whether or not I had ever seen the actual painting.  It belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where we were visitors from time to time.  But my mother also owned a book on the museum’s “highlights,” and I liked to pour over the book during island moments of my childhood.

Certainly my choice of a favorite wasn’t fashionable.  Tiepolo hasn’t really been on anybody’s Top Forties List since the 1750s when this picture was painted.  But children don’t care about things like that.  Children love or hate with great abandon and with no respect for ceremony.  Pondering this now, I must say the subject matter looks rather politically incorrect.  And I can only surmise now what it was that attracted my childish attention then.  My guess is that I was reeled in on a draughtsman’s line. 

Drawing in Tiepolo’s works is so crisp.  The shapely arms and hands of the seated woman and the forceful, aggressive gesture of her would-be attacker (we might call him her alleged assailant) arrive on the canvas by means of the most thorough-going and keen sense of contour.  The artist’s love for dynamic, sinuous line is equally evident in a subordinate feature such as the rolling folds of the woman’s bright skirt.

If it happened that I had seen the actual canvas in childhood, I was no doubt impressed by scale, too.  Size matters.  This painting is 55 x 43 inches.  A large enough oval to command one’s respect — one that puts these persons quite resolutely into the dramatic space of the room. 

It’s not a family-themed picture.  From this distance in time, the museum seems unsure what to make of its narrative, calling the painting simply: “Scene from Ancient History,” though historian John Walker in the National Gallery’s 1975 catalog was venturesome enough to call it “Timocleia and the Thracian Commander.”  Enterprising readers can google that to see what pops up.  Suffice it to say, judging by visual clues alone, male violence is a central theme.  The soldier’s shoulder is the pivot point of the whole composition.  What befell poor Timocleia, I cannot say.

But I doubt I contemplated the question of its story very deeply.  I had as much narrative as my mother’s book provided — that catalog dated from 1941 when art historians were more garrulous.  The book now resides in another state, so I’ll have to get back to you regarding this cliff-hanger (in perhaps some future post).  Meanwhile, I suspect that my chief delight was visual.  In even Tiepolo’s violent image the bright, vivid colors abound – held tightly and tensely inside Tiepolo’s razor sharp lines.

Kids aren’t fashionable, and thus they provide a model for every artist to emulate.  A child likes what she likes, and artists do well to reserve the same whimsical and fervent emotions as their privilege.  The heart doesn’t really enjoy being asked to obey rules.  If you find yourself loving all the gauche things, care not.  You cannot fool your true self.  In finding what binds you to the world, you have to indulge some self-acceptance.

My first love for incisive line began somewhere rather near Venice of the 18th century.  On the map of my early enthusiasm I place a big “X” to mark Gallery 32 where Tiepolo’s painting hangs.

You have to know these things about yourself.  You have to discover what really matters, for from out of those things your own imagination’s designs grow.

[Top of the Post:  Scene from Ancient History, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, c. 1750, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art in Washington]

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]

Sorry, of Late

Sorry I haven’t posted any art today.  Of late, I’ve tried to post something everyday.  However, today the frogs have taken up all my time.  They’re quite unruly. 

[Top of the post:  the frogs at home]

Pixel With Colors

Pixel swims into so many of my pictures.  Here he is all colored with crayon.  He usually lives and swims in this painting.  “Il faut refaire la meme chose, dix fois, cents fois ….” Degas said.  I took it very much to heart.  I’ve lost count how many times I’ve drawn Pixel.  (“You must redraw the same thing, ten times, a hundred times….”)

[Top of the post:  Pixel with Colors, by Aletha Kuschan, pencil and crayon]

Alice’s Mouse

As you can see she like’s it with hotsauce. Fish, of course, is the main course.  Alice has very nice decor, wouldn’t you agree?  Hmm, got milk?

[Top of the post:  Alice's Table, by the kid]

Reclining Doll

Alice, it seems, is not the only one who’s tired.  The doll is taking a siesta as well.  Must be the heat.  Summer is a great season for dreams.

[Top of the post:  Painting of a Doll, by Aletha Kuschan, oil on canvas]

Alice is a tired cat!

Alice has been so busy drawing that she had to take a break and lean on the Kleenex box to rest!  Whew!  (And remember, strictly entre nous, Alice is not a “toy.”)  Hard work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  However, drawing is both work and play, so Alice is a happy cat. 

All that drawing can also make a cat hungry.  She told me she was going to go catch a mouse!

[Top of the post:  Alice resting after drawing her self-portrait, by Aletha Kuschan, Magic Doodle]