After the first touch

Yesterday I started a painting of Ft. Pickens. I sketched the outline in grey, then added zinced down cerulean blue for the water, a light gray with an ultra blue-green tint for the tree line, zinced down yellow  ochre and orange for the ground cover inside the fort, a sweet olive green in middle distance and on the oak tree and various orange and maroon hues for the brick fort walls. This was mostly applied in short strokes with the bare canvas showing through. Whatever shortcomings it had, this first set of touches had a nice feel and color harmony.

I have taken pictures of stages of work for awhile now as a way to learn what I am doing. There are painters who have the end product fully formed in their minds when they begin. That is an extraordinary talent. But it's not how I work. Every time, every stroke, every drawing and color choice is a product of the moment of perception and reaction. It could go in a number of different ways, bit by bit, provisional every step of the way. It involves a certain kind of concentration like contour drawing. At least, at my best, this is how it works. The one who was the best at this approach for my money was Cézanne.

Whenever I'm distracted from that moment of perception, or become tired, or decide to step back and look, then a different set of habitual thoughts kick in. These include "are the shapes right" "is that the real color" "is it sloppy there" "let me fill in that space" "does it need some drawing details," to name a few. So I'll carry on with these in no particular order. As I "fix" one thing, other parts of the picture fall further into or out of balance. There's a middle period after the first set of touches where I end up fixing some things and losing the fresh touch by housepainting, just moving back and forth with no attention to the vitality of the stroke.  There are times where I have to render something more carefully and the dilemma is to ensure that doing so still blends in with the fresher parts. At some point I arrive at a near end, then the final few tweaks and it's "done."

After painting this scene, I am thinking about using a rule to only do 2 hours at a time and then set it aside, so I can come back the next day and really appreciate what's good and fresh in the first touch.

 

 

 

 

Chladni plates, Klee, and Kyoto

"The vibratory impulse is the heart of the matter. It causes the sand to arranges itself in a corresponding rhythmical order. First in other words the vibratory impulse, the will or need for living action, then the transformation into a material event and lastly the visible expression in the form of newly arranged material." Paul Klee Notebooks, the Nature of Nature. 

Klee was steeped in music. Theme and variation, rhythm and proportion. The Chladni plates which prompted this passage must have fascinated him- the visualization of the vibratory impulse. 

Klee continues, "We are the bow, we represent the expressive impulse, mediated by the substance, with the sand figures as the final formal result. ... It is though matter were being fertilized and became invested under this dictate with a kind of life of its own."

Last month I saw sand arranged in forms aimed at stilling or at least distilling  the mind's vibrations. Here are some examples. First at Tenryu ji Temple in Arashiyama then at Ginkasu ji Temple in Kyoto.

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Saturday on the Mall with Meghan

This afternoon Meghan and I walked the Mall, stopping first at the Renwick and then meeting up with Peter before going to the Hirshhorn (too bad the Kusama Infinity Mirror slots were sold out), then a nice interlude in the Mary Livingston Ripley garden, and then lunch at Ebbitt Grill. We had a great time.

Phillips-Lautrec

Before I painted I did cartoons inspired from childhood influences such as comics, caricatures, and satirical stuff like political cartoonists, Mad Magazine, and underground artists like Shelton and Crumb. So when I moved on in my teens to learning about painters, especially turn of the century French painters, Lautrec was incredibly magnetic. Full size torso on stunted legs, he carried a hollow cane filled with absinthe. A parade of continentals behaving badly, a spontaneous sense of composition that caught life on the fly, chaotic compositions, like the dancer's leg thrust into an aristocrat's beak. I've seen many paintings of his but this exhibit at the Phillips was the first time to face the actual posters, and they are much, much larger and more varied than I realized.  I saw stages of his prints, not something I've seen before. Cheret, Mucha, and Lautrec helped fuel l'affichomanie at the turn of the century, but its power endured. Mucha's art nouveau Job cigarette paper ads were newly popular when poster-mania overtook me in my teens in the hippie shops and music outlets,  and I decorated my ceiling with posters of all types, heavily leaning on black light op-art and vintage movie stills. Once while I was  away, my parents let an elderly friend from Memphis sleep in my bedroom. The next morning she said, "I felt so secure with Winston Churchill looking down at me all night" (it was WC Fields). 

In 1977-78, I went to France to paint and on my return I placed in a cargo container a year's worth of paintings removed from stretchers and drawings encased in a series of jumbo concert posters yanked off the walls of Aix, London, and Paris.

National Portrait Gallery

Late today I spent some time at the National Portrait Gallery and was delighted to find so rich an assortment of people, from colonial days through the Civil War to the Golden Age and on into modern times. Here are some samples, and what a range of emotion they have. The colonial portraits had a more intimate emotional effect than usual for formal portraits. So glad to see included people inside and outside the power structure. One corridor had rows of tiny Matthew Brady portraits of everyone from PT Barnum to Harriet Tubman. Upstairs in the Presidential collection I enjoyed the portraits of Lincoln, Grant, TR, FDR, among others. 

Above the Portrait collections was a remarkable group of American art work, some traditional, some dada/surreal, some pop and post-pop. It wasn't until I got on the Metro home that I realized how long I had been standing and walking around in that place. 

At the end of this slideshow is Indiana's Figure 5, inspired via Charles Demuth by William Carlos Williams's "The Great Figure" 

Among the rain 

and lights 

I saw the figure 5 

in gold 

on a red 

firetruck 

moving 

tense 

unheeded 

to gong clangs 

siren howls 

and wheels rumbling 

through the dark city.