artamaze by Katherine Hilden

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/23/the-radical-otherness-of-birds-jonathan-franzen-on-why-they-matter

Your Kitsch-detector

Posted in Quotes, Semiotics, Therapy, tagged angel-kitsch, crows, Jonathan Franzen, kitsch, kitsch-detector, myth, Stanley Cavell, superstition on December 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »

How long had she been perched on that thin branch? When I saw her, I pulled up a chair and watched her sway in the wind for seventeen minutes. During all that time she faced in one direction and vocalized almost constantly. No other crow came near. The wind picked up and she finally took off.

The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. Their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things. The stories we tell about the past and imagine for the future are mental constructions that birds can do without. Birds live squarely in the present. —Jonathan Franzen

While being fascinated by her for those seventeen minutes I realized how ignorant I was about crows. I had read that they have a vocabulary of dozens of calls; that they socialize in groups; warn each other of approaching predators; gather in the place where a crow had died; visit mom’s tree after moving away; make tools and solve puzzles. Still, I felt ignorant because I couldn’t interpret her call or any of the calls my neighborhood crows make.

As my brain was wallowing in ignorance, I reminded myself that most human brains are happy to fill in that gap of ignorance with myths, superstitions and symbols, all of it Kitsch.

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell said, there’s nothing human beings want more than to be something else.

Some of our myths shows humans with wings—being bird-like. Voila, Angels, Cupid, Psyche–the epitome of Kitsch!

Why is it worth thinking about this?

Our ancestors slipped into this escape from ignorance into saccharine superstitions and symbols. Look around you. We’re still drowning in Kitsch.

As an artist you need to keep your Kitsch-detector turned way up. When you’re working on a painting, a sculpture, a composition or a short story you have to scan your work repeatedly with that trusty Kitsch-detector. Revise! Revise! It’s work. That’s why a work of art can take so long.

What I’m suggesting with this bird-in-a-tree-story is that you can keep the Kitsch-detector hooked on your belt at all times, even when you’re pacing through your quarantine house and casually looking out the window.

I didn’t want to anthropomorphize the crow when I started to write this post, but “it” seemed inappropriate for such an intelligent being. Why did I choose “she” instead of “he?” I like to think it was an arbitrary choice, but maybe I had a Kitsch moment and emotionally identified with “her.”

Stanley Cavell, 1926-2018

For the full essay by Jonathan Franzen:

For crows and myths:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/new-caledonian-crow

https://mythsymbolsandplay.typepad.com/my-blog/bird-symbolism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_ravens

https://www.learnreligions.com/the-magic-of-crows-and-ravens-2562511

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1204876597&disposition=inline

https://www.dw.com/en/why-beethoven-snubbed-princes-and-put-his-music-first/a-19544501

Beethoven’s 250th birthday

Posted in inspiration, Quotes, Therapy, tagged Beethoven on December 16, 2020| 1 Comment »

Ludwig van Beethoven was born on this day 250 years ago. It was customary to baptize babies the day after they were born and since his baptismal record in Bonn shows December 17^th as the date, it’s safe to assume his birth date is December 16, 1770.

The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. In the same way, the seriousness essential to it and wholly excluding the ludicrous from its direct and peculiar province is to be explained from the fact that its object is not the representation, in regard to which deception and ridiculousness alone are possible, but that this object is directly the will; and this is essentially the most serious of all things, as being that on which all depends.– Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

All art constantly aspires to the conditions of music.— Walter Pater (1839-1894)

Beethoven once stopped playing when an aristocrat was talking in the front row: “I’m not playing for such pigs.” (Für solche Schweine spiel ich nicht.)

Being an Artist takes courage, it’s work and you have to risk being misunderstood.

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk00_5B1hIExLDZoTfK3KAWVvje7PqQ:1607908360102&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=clyfford+still&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjgh4q1pcztAhVBeawKHQQ7A9MQiR56BAgnEAI&biw=1462&bih=836

Clifford Still

Posted in abstraction, Achievement, Color, Composition, Left-Right, Negative space, tagged Clifford Still, Clifford Still Museum on December 13, 2020| 2 Comments »

I came across this drawing recently and can’t get it out of my mind.

It’s small, 12x9in. Pastel on paper. 1951

All I can think of doing to it is flip it horizontally and, behold, it doesn’t work in this view.

What we have here is a non-representational image of such internal tension that it cannot be altered.

It looks like nothing. Nothing?

When I look at this drawing–the original, on top– I want to project a vertical structure or a tree trunk between the red and black lines. But that vanishes immediately. What’s left is the quick markmaking, apparently unconscious, and the dominance of “negative space.”

The choice of deep yellow paper is uncanny. Imagine the paper gray or green or blue. No go.

Clifford Still is known for his huge paintings, as seen in the Clifford Still Museum in Denver.

This painting, PH812, also from 1951, measures 115 x 104 inches.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/kitsch-101/

Capturing beauty—gotcha!

Posted in Composition, Fluxus, Illustration, Imagination, inspiration, Seeing, Surreal, Technique and Demo, tagged capturing beauty on December 12, 2020| 2 Comments »

In the last post we started by looking at something beautiful and ended up by suggesting that beauty may be a trap. A breathtaking view becomes a trap if you think you can –how to say this—trap it. The common word for this is “capturing it.”

“Oh, you captured that perfectly.”

“That is so beautiful; I want to see if I can capture it in my painting.”

People talk about “capturing” all the time. In music, painting, in a novel, a movie. As if art making were some sort of hunting sport: you hunt the beauty down and then—gotcha!–you corral it in a fenced lot. You killed it!

So, art making is a form of execution. If that’s too strong a word, how about strangulation.

In any case, “capturing” results in lifelessness.

We don’t want lifelessness, do we.

The reason that a painting that duplicates a photo would result in lifelessness is that it would make something monumental, i.e. static, out of a fleeting moment. That would be a lie.

So, how can you allow yourself to be inspired by this image without deceiving yourself?

You can allow yourself to be mesmerized by a small passage that does not refer to a recognizable corner of reality. It does not illustrate anything.

Now, that you can paint—or draw! Not as a copyist, not directly, not in detail, but in gesture, in complete self-abandon. If you pivot your mind into that level of fiction, you may be onto something.

Onto what? We can’t predict. Let’s see.

https://www.google.com/search?q=kitsch+paintings&sxsrf=ALeKk00yb4znbMS_QycmurXZ4BM_6uO_sA:1607267751264&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFyf360rntAhUIKKwKHcn-Ce8Q7AkoAXoECA4QCw&biw=1404&bih=836#imgrc=wLELglpVy6BbxM

Kitsch 101

Posted in Caricature, Failed Effort, Quotes, Semiotics, tagged kitsch, Oscar Wilde, photography vs. painting, W.S.Merwin on December 6, 2020| 1 Comment »

If you say, nice photo, I’ll say, thanks. The afternoon sun does this refraction performance through my front door. I can remember how I looked up from reading at my dining room table. I gasped and reached for my camera. These light effects don’t last long.

If you say, ohmygod that is awesome I want to make a painting of this, then…well, then, I’ll have to say, errmm, we need to talk.

The photo gives our attention a little jolt because it reminds us that in life there are these moments that we hardly notice because we’re preoccupied with our chores and plans.

But a painting duplicating the photo would be overdoing it. It would be superimposing grandeur onto something subtle.

I sympathize with this impulse to paint a scene that moves you and makes you sigh, oh how beautiful. You want to celebrate that, to dwell on it by translating every nuance and detail into paint on canvas.

But this experience of beauty does not translate. What a shocking thing to say. (We’ll talk about this some more, two or three posts hence, with the help of W.S. Merwin.)

Oscar Wilde said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”

That’s also true of painting. People who want to paint their deep, genuine feeling about beauty, will produce–brace yourself!–things like this:

…and, of course, cats.

The word for this is Kitsch.

Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

W.S. Merwin, 1927-2019