Pure Imagination

My kid is a member of the tech crew for the school play Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  She’s been going around humming this tune by Anthony Newley all afternoon.  Here’s a fine version by Troubleclef.  A lovely creamy musical thing to fill ones thoughts with — and not so many calories as real chocolate.  Though actual chocolate’s pretty wonderful too.

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!

Cezanne’s Mountain and its Imitators

I’m in mountain mode.  Inspired by a topic created at Bénédicte’s blog, I have been thinking about mountains and how to portray them.  They have been a favorite subject of mine before, and it’s fun to come at them again. 

I decided to begin by making a little pochade after Cezanne’s famous Mont Ste Victoire.

Meanwhile, others have had their minds on mountains too.  Actually, I think these are supposed to be “towers,” in some cases even radio towers?  But towers and mountains do have much in common, so the drawings by children at my kid’s school help me think how I might paint this subject.  Here’s one sample:

music from a little shell

I have been listening to music I hear coming from inside a small shell.  It seems to sing me advice concerning the painting of my koi fish.  Its music comes from a great distance, whispering from far inside its small architecture, and it winds round chamber upon chamber to reach the outer air of the world.  Yet the delight it produces is commensurate with something much louder and grander.  It’s really quite an amazing little shell.

[Top of the post: drawing of a lonely shell, by Aletha Kuschan, ballpoint pen]

Half Fish Myself

All my preoccupation with the koi is making me half fish myself.  This is not a dream from which one wishes to awake.  Here is a dream one wants to dream.

Art School

I find myself often wondering how an artist ought to be educated. The old masters had workshops. You wanted to learn how to paint — you go hang out with the local guy who paints. If the local guy isn’t teaching you as much as you want, you find another artist to study with, someone who has a reputation for being the “it” guy. Thus Rembrandt found his way into Lastman’s studio.

Well, for a while. Someone like Rembrandt doesn’t really need a teacher in the ordinary sense — or rather, let’s just observe that he needs a really, really good teacher. The teacher he needs might not be alive, as indeed was the case. Rembrandt studied with da Vinci, Raphael and Rubens, and others.

Today artists go to university. That has certain obvious advantages. You learn to become technologically savvy. You make the acquaintance of professors who expect you to read a lot of books (these are usually professors in other departments). And if you stay on the straight and narrow, they give you official recognition in the form of a degree (something the old masters never had).

Whether the university art department has something valuable to offer: that’s another question and varies greatly from place to place. We could call it the Rembrandt factor.

Today art is supposed to be about what’s hip and happening now. Press this idea a little and you see that many artists fully embrace the concept of planned obsolescence. Let’s face it, if the old masters have as their over-riding fault the fact that they are old, then certainly one’s own art (regardless how hip it was in its moment) will someday (perhaps in a week or so) be old too. What’s the point?

Or, art is supposed to be about doing something no one has ever done before (to accept this notion it does help to have been born yesterday, quite literally). We’ll call this the Guinness Book of World Records approach. Guy who has eaten the most worms. (Yuk) First artist to make a picture out of styrofoam. First artist to paint with ketchup, and so on through many heady firsts!

The problem with the Guinness artist is that it’s hard to see exactly why the young art student’s parents should be paying all that hefty tuition just so that junior can do what cannot be taught. If, after all, you are boldly going where no one has ever gone before — how is someone to teach you? Isn’t the thing that can be taught, by definition, academic? And isn’t the academic approach the icky route to be assiduously avoided?

What the young artist needs clearly, and this is especially true for the hipster crowd, is a garret. But garrets are lonely places and if you’re making stuff out of old car parts the last thing you want is solitude. It helps to have a few fellow enthusiasts around to cheer you on — especially with the obsolescence thing biting at your heels.

[Top of the post:  An Artist at his Easel, by Rembrandt.  This post originally appeared at Art Writing Bold Drawing.]

PS – My “Cheat Sheet”

Searching for the answer to the riddle Kitsune offered, I doodled a bunch of trials that make nice hieroglyphics.  Looks like the Rosetta stone for space alien languages!

[Top of the post:  Cheat Sheet for solving a riddle, by Aletha Kuschan]

Anne Sophie Mutter and her Opposite

There’s an episode of Seinfeld called “The Understudy” where one of Jerry’s many girl friends gets her big break in a Broadway musical only to flub her opening number.  The very whiny girl friend turns to the audience and pleads with them to let her start over.  Violinist Anne Sophie Mutter would be the opposite of that.  I had a chance to watch Mutter perform once at the Kennedy Center in Washington thanks to the generosity of a friend (artists are way too poor to afford tickets to Mutter’s recitals).  Anne Sophie Mutter’s performance was so perfect, it’s hard to believe she’s human.  She is angelic or something. Oddly enough, she gets a certain amount of flak for her virtuosity.  Her performance is so perfect that people imagine her music lacks emotion.  The music is full of emotion!  It’s just that we’ve almost come to equate emotion with imperfection!

I have a violin and started “fiddling around” with it some years ago, and when I’m very well warmed up I can play some jazz by ear that’s not too shabby.  (It helps if all the planets are perfectly aligned.)  I doubt I could ever have been a performer even if, like Mutter, I had begun at age four.  In that area of life where I have the most freedom and fluency, I make mistakes all the time.  Big ones!

Maybe artists are just clumsy people.  One artist here at wordpress has the picture of a Julian easel toppling over in a stream as a kind of logo.  And I’ll bet that WR Jones has some stories he could tell you.  I have painted things en plein air, thought my picture magnificient, stood back for the better view, and watched the whole thing go SMACK face down in the dirt by an ill-timed gust of wind.  I cannot count the unfortunate bugs I’ve picked out of other en plein air productions.  And I’m always dropping stuff, brushes and whatnot.  Or losing things (the precise photo, drawing, whatever, that I need for the project at hand).

What I absolutely love about painting, the reason why I know it was meant for me, is that painting is a performance that takes place in utter secrecy and the only notes that count are the ones visible on the top layer.  You can make a tangled mess of the bottom, you can change your mind a thousand times, you can miss your cue, falter on the first note, sing out of key, forget the words — as long as you recover in that thin top layer — you win!

[Top of the post:  First layers (learning the riff) of the latest project, by Aletha Kuschan, oil on canvas]

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]

Stream of Consciousness

And this is the stream of consciousness!