George W. Bush Holds a Brush

Isn’t it great that he took up painting, hired tutors and practiced!  It’s an activity that can lead to self-reflection and insights into all sorts of things, like other people’s lives, how we conceptualize …cultural assumptions, uncertainties…

These paintings by Bush are not presented as a documentation of what he has learned so far, as evidence of effort.  They are presented to us as finished work, as art worth looking at. When something is presented as art it’s ipso facto interesting and important to think about.

Let’s do a thought experiment:   would my neighbor George have a chance of having his paintings shown in a gallery or published in a book?  He has been painting diligently since he retired ten years ago. His portraits are indistinguishable from Bush’s.

Whether or not George, my neighbor, can get his paintings shown depends on what we know about George.  What’s George’s story? Is he blind or paralyzed or recovering from a stroke?  Is he autistic or dyslexic or epileptic?  Was his father a Greek immigrant or an African genocide survivor or a Russian spy or a US president?  In our present social climate and art world hype these questions weave the scrim through which we see images.

Try another thought experiment:  you buy a portrait at a yard sale that’s just awful but it looks like oil paint and it’s the right size.  You plan to use it as a waterproof mat in your mud room at the side door to your garden.  As you take it out of the frame you see the signature “John Wilkes Booth.”  You know he was an actor. Couldn’t he also have been trying to paint?  It’s a terrible painting but you think you’d better have it authenticated because this could be worth something.  Inept as it is, the name will override the awfulness.

A 2014 review in the Guardian agrees with me:   [George W Bush’s] portrait of Putin actually looks like something you would find in one of America’s trash-rich Salvation Army stores and buy to laugh at. It’s got a classic amateur clumsiness and oddity to it. Bush has attempted to render shadow and shape in stylish blocks of fawn and woodchip and cookies ‘n cream, but they don’t sit right and the whole head looks mildly crazed. Perhaps this mad look is what is meant by revealing Putin’s “soul”, but it seems inept rather than insightful.

 

No, wait.  The Salvation Army stores used to stack their “art” in bins so that you could page through them.  I had a student a few years ago who used to go there to buy awful paintings because she needed stretched canvas to re-use—much cheaper than buying canvas in art supply stores.

I went to my local Salvation Army store last week to see if they had anything as awful as the portraits by Bush, walked straight to the back and found all pictures neatly displayed.  Somebody stood there facing the display, entranced by a copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper.  It looked as if it had been painted on a slab of wood.  I couldn’t get close because after about a minute the Entranced One unhooked it to take it to check-out.

The original is a fresco covering one wall of the dining room in a monastery in Milan, Italy.  Leonardo labored over the perspective to create the illusion that the Last Supper is taking place in that very monastery refectory so that the monks would be edified by saintly company.

Along with much of High Renaissance art, this painting has been adapted in countless Kitsch mockeries.  Here are some:

https://www.google.com/search?sa=X&sxsrf=ALeKk00NtVLvp_9fxsvDJ3pTLcGm675gEw:1620835332636&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=The+Last+Supper&ved=2ahUKEwiqq_aRwsTwAhXJQs0KHQt3DGcQiR56BAgmEAI&biw=1378&bih=837

Sorry about that tangent.  I didn’t mean to associate Bush with the Renaissance in any way, only wanted to clarify the reference to the Salvation Army.

Back to Bush.   A more recent Guardian article, from 2017, refracts the whole portrait project in the context of Bush’s presidency, stating:    In his new book Portraits of Courage, the subjects of the former president’s paintings are the very men torn to shreds, quite literally, by his own policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/06/george-w-bush-art-painting-portraits-in-courage

Painting can be therapeutic. If Mr.Bush engages in painting to heal his guilt, let him.

If “idiocy has its charms” (quoting that article here), please, Mr. Bush, show us how you worked through that stage of charming idiocy and then finally developed insights for us to contemplate.

We hope you heal, Mr. Bush.

There is, of course, plenty of commentary on Bush’s paintings, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yaSAiXkRtg

Next, let’s take a closer look at how Mr. Bush does not see eyes.

 

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Orazio Gentileschi’s Finding of Moses

Orazio Gentileschi was born near Florence in 1563.  From 1626 on he lived in England and worked for the Stuart king Charles I, who on the occasion of the birth of his son in 1630 commissioned Gentileschi to paint “The Finding of Moses” as a gift to his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria.

As moderns we are accustomed to seeing all art—musical, literary, pictorial—as invention. We know that the artist constructs his work. He plans out his composition.  It’s always been done that way.

Let’s take apart this invention, this construction called “The Finding of Moses.” 

What a lovely English landscape we have here in the background, with meadows leading to a river–the Nile/Thames–and a verdant hill on the other bank.  The women are gathered in front of a stand of tall trees, in full summer foliage, possibly maples or elms.  Not a palm or papyrus reed in sight.  Gentileschi had never been to Egypt and neither had Henrietta Maria, so all’s well with the English shrubbery here.

The pharaoh’s daughter, in gold-yellow, is eight heads tall. We know that our ancestors, including royals, were shorter than we are now. No matter, tall looks commanding and besides, a tall figure will display more fabric, which allows the painter to create a more colorful painting.

The figure on the left is Moses’s mom, a slave and also six heads tall. Gentileschi wants her tall because that way the he aligns the tops of the heads in a horizontal line. Thinking ahead, we now notice that on the right the bodies are also aligned in a straight vertical line. He clusters the figures together into a compact geometry, which makes the composition cohesive and easy to read.

Now what about all these arms?!  The two women pointing over yonder to the Nile/Thames clarify where the baby was found. Compositionally these two arms lead the viewer into the center of the drama.  Three more arms converge on the center of attention, the baby in a basket. And what long arms they are. Gentileschi gets away with this anatomical distortion because the bodies are kneeling.  If the two women in the font were to stand up, their hands would dangle at their knees.  No matter. Composition rules.  Composition directs the viewer’s attention. That’s what counts.

The baby is contentedly lying high on bedding piled up in the basket.  So high, that it would have tipped over while floating in water.  No matter.  You’re a painter; therefore you invent what needs to be invented to make the picture work.  The picture works if it FEELS right to the client and the occasion.

The baby is naked.  And it’s a boy!  The ancient Egyptian princess, dressed in 17^th century English royal garb, is pointing to his genitals.  Queen Henrietta Maria must have been pleased to project a parallel into this painting between Moses and her own newborn son. Gentileschi knew his craft, technically and politically.

Perhaps an ambassador described the charms of this painting to Philip IV, king of Spain, who might have expressed a desire to have a painting by Orazio Gentileschi. The king was known to appreciate art, visiting the studio of his court painter Velazques to sit quietly in his own regal chair just to watch Velazquez paint.  Gentileschi, ever the diplomat, then painted a copy of “The Finding of Moses” for Philip IV and engaged his son to personally deliver it to the king in Spain.

Notice that he changed the overall composition.  He makes two alterations to change the composition from a rectangle to a quarter of a pie. The two arms pointing to the Nile are gone and the woman at the far right who is kneeling while holding the basket is now heavily draped and conspicuously plump compared to the other women in the group.  She is plump because she has to support the curve of the composition.

This painting hangs in the great central gallery at the Prado.  Eight women in a painting!  You can see from a long distance away that this has to be a Gentileschi.

His daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi, will be next.

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Attention

NOW WHAT!!  You want us to look at your boring geraniums in your boring kitchen???!!!

What caught my attention was how the afternoon light made the stems glow. On the right, see that?  See how the stems are outlined in yellow?

How would my camera see that?  As I framed the shot, before I zoomed in on that light effect, I noticed intimations of the Golden Section.

Not one, but two.  In the green lines, the square is on the left.  In the pink, the square is on the right. As a bonus, the red blooms define the corner of the next square in the Golden Section sequence.

In my peripatetic readings I recently came across a quote from Nicolas Malebranche: “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”   He had to talk like that because he was a Catholic priest trying to stay alive in 17^th century France.  He’s classified as a rational philosopher, working in the shadow of Descartes: notice the word “natural” in front of “prayer.”

1600 years before that,  Epictetus said:  “You become what you give your attention to. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will … and their motives may not be the highest.”  Epictetus was born a slave in the Roman Empire and became the teacher of Marcus Aurelius.

So, the difference between boring and ta-dah! is not out there in those overwintering geraniums but in that switch in your brain.  You can practice throwing your attention switch.  You can pivot from worry about your to-do list to…attention, now.

Nicolas Malebranche, 1638-1715

Epictetus, 50-135

Marcus Aurelius, 121-180

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This Won’t Sell

No real estate agent would like this photo.  It doesn’t show off the house.  No curb appeal!  And what’s with the trees!?

Sorry, sir/madam, this picture is not about the house.  It’s not even about Halloween.

Well, what then!!! –It’s not about anything.–Sound of doors slamming.

This is the last of three frames I took of this scene.  The first two have too much context.  Then I saw the juxtaposition of the straight vertical trees and the pumpkins marching horizontally. Click.

I saw an image, a play of lines and dots.

Here’s the first shot, rejected, due to too much information/illustration.

 

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Walk-Zoom-Click

The back-lighting stopped me in my tracks.  The shadow was as dark as the tree trunk itself. They looked continuous as if they were of the same substance. The lawn looked as if it had been spray painted DA-glo.  Mind you, this photo is not tweaked.  My phone camera saw this strange light effect.  Drama like this is momentary. Click.

I immediately zoomed in.  No distraction, no nice residential context with a house.  What we get now is…

…a repetition of forms.  On the right, spiky triangles.  On the left, and spilling onto the big triangle, you see amorphous meanderings.

Do we still have trees, lawn and late afternoon lighting?  Yes, we’re still reminded of how wonderful these real lawns in our neighborhoods are.

We also have just the opposite:  flat patterns on a flat surface confined in a rectangular frame.

Now it may dawn on you that you’re having an art experience.  “Art does not stand for something outside itself” –Fairfield Porter, remember.

You can focus on the picture surface or what it represents, but not both at the same time — as Gombrich said in Art and Illusion.

But you can practice toggling back and forth between the two ways of seeing.  Practice that!

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Walking in the Neighborhood

You’re walking in late afternoon when the shadows are very long. You notice that shadows can take strange, aggressive shapes on an expanse of lawn.  Click. In the picture the shadow looks even stranger than it did in reality.  Why is that?

Walk on. At an intersection you see shadows on the distant lawn. Click.

But you took a wide angle, getting the street into the frame of your camera.  It’s merely a documentation of this corner of an unremarkable street.

You raise your arms and you zoom in on the distant lawn.  Click.  Now you have an image of triangular shapes on a green surface with some rectangle in the upper part of the frame.  This is getting interesting. But you still have the street in there.

Now crop the reference to the street because it’s too much context, which makes the image point to something outside itself.

Why is this interesting?  Because now you have an image that can be seen two ways: one, as a reference to a green lawn with triangular shadows cast by neighboring buildings and two, as a pattern of geometrical forms that refer to nothing outside of themselves.

If you want to see this duality even more clearly, take out the color.

Now you have an arrangement of shapes that “does not stand for something outside itself.”  Is this art?  Hmmm, maybe.

On second look, yes.  Notice how the image has a unifying texture: the bricks of the wall have specks of black shadows that echo the specks of leaves on the lawn.  This unifying texture has nothing to do with what’s being represented.  “Art does not stand for something outside itself,” as Fairfield Porter would put it.

You can frame this, hang it on a wall, glance at it in passing and momentarily inhabit the realm of form, which is pure feeling.  Like music.

 

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Artspeak, Now

If you plowed through those two pages from Fairfield Porter (in the last post), you noticed that his thinking has peaks of clarity and ruts of generalizations.

He says, the new American painting is “more accurately called non-objective than abstract.” That’s a peak. It’s a good distinction.  Whenever we hear painting described as “abstract” we should translate that as “non-objective.”  Thank you, Fairfield.

Then, on the second page, we have “art does not stand for something outside itself.”  That’s another peak.  Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Porter!!!!

The rest of that page is erudite theorizing that must have pleased his publisher.  This new non-objective art was shocking enough; the critical language had to break it gently to the public.    After all, everybody assumed that art had to represent something. It was a cultural given that it would be absurd to look at art that was so presumptuous as to stand on its own.  It took a while for the shock of the new to wear off.  But the shock did gradually dampen down and now Artspeak unabashedly talks about art as it is.

Here’s a review, chosen randomly, from last September’s Art in America.

The whole review describes the physical materials and how they were placed in the exhibit space. There’s no mention of symbolism, historical references or why anybody should go see this.

Yes, indeed, art does not stand for something outside itself, as Fairfield Porter said sixty years ago.  But I wonder if he would find this installation too challenging to look at. Too absurd?  Too hard to pay attention to?

Paying attention!  That’s the key. Paying attention to what’s actually in front of you is not so easy.

In the next few posts, let’s zoom in on this problem of paying attention. How hard can that be!? For example, if I say this image is art, can I say it does not stand for something outside itself?  That is, how hard can it be to pay attention to this image–as image?

 

 

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/10/27/artspeak-then/

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Edward Hopper and Film Noir

Film noir is defined as “a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”

The central characters in film noir are often gangsters, detectives and a femme fatale.

Hopper’s paintings are also characterized by “a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”

Nighthawks, 1942, is his most famous painting.  (The Art Institute of Chicago snatched it up as soon as its paint was dry and it is, along with Grant Wood’s American Gothic, one of the reasons people go to the AI.)

It’s not a Norman Rockwell family scene, is it?  Two guys in fedoras and a skinny redhead in a red dress, smokin’ and drinkin’ coffee way past midnight.  What kind of characters are these?  A gangster, a gum shoe and a dame?  Sounds about right to me.

Film noir drew them in from the late 20’ to the 50’s.  The look of the genre became stylized and predictable. When any art is worked out according to a formula, it can only crank out material for so long before it invites satire and parody.

As does Hopper:

Ten years after Nighthawk, Edward Hopper was still working with his wooden, predictable formula.  Here’s Morning Sun from 1952 and a parody I gleaned from the internet.

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

 

https://www.google.com/search?sa=X&sxsrf=ALeKk00bTzmOgQZ5Yx88JNsnDKd–FkCjQ:1598208829948&q=Nighthawks+(painting)&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLQz9U3yEg2LlHiBLHMDHPNM7SUspOt9Msyi0sTc-ITi0qQmJnFJVbl-UXZxY8YY7kFXv64JywVMmnNyWuMflxEaBJS4WJzzSvJLKkUkuLikYLbrcEgxcUF51kxaTDxLGIV9ctMzyjJSCzPLlbQKEjMBOrLS9cEABz2VzCzAAAA&npsic=0&tbs=kac:1,kac_so:0&ved=2ahUKEwj_xNfs_7HrAhWWLs0KHcusC0AQ-BYwJHoECB8QLg

 

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Crop that Plant and Mat it

Same plant.  More daring.

I call this view of the plant more daring because it’s not centered.

When the object of your gaze is not centered, you’re likely think it is…

not traditional

unbalanced

incomplete

unexpected

surprising

edgy

engaging

modern

Which of these stands out because it contains all the others?

If you say “modern” you might be running a gallery or ready to start one.

If you say “engaging”  your insight goes to the heart of the matter. Because the drawing is incomplete, unbalanced, surprising, etc, you sit up and pay attention. The viewer is challenged to participate in completing the view of the plant.  The art experience becomes a conversation.  That’s how we as moderns relate to art.

This drawing also says “incomplete.”  We see it as a work in progress.  That’s how we experience conversations when we’re in them.

For that reason we want to see the marks on paper as just that, marks on paper.  We can see that more marks may come.  Therefore we want to see the paper as paper with all the sense of potential that that implies: show the unmarked edges when you mat it.   See above.

The sharp edge of the mat, announcing this drawing is finished, conveys a misleading  feeling.  Do you agree?

See also:

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/07/16/just-a-plant/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/and-now-a-message-from-the-mat/

Drawing by Sunja Kim.  Graphite on paper, 18”x 12”

 

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Zooming In

In 2002 the photographer Barbara Bordnick published “Searchings. Secret Landscapes of Flowers.”  In this large-format book, the close-up photos of flowers measure 10”x14.” They are astonishing. You know it’s a flower and the flower’s name is given.  At the same time you are obviously looking at something other than a little flower–you’re imagining landscape formations or some atmospheric effect.

Georgia O’Keefe, famous for her huge paintings of flowers said, “If you look, really look at a flower, it becomes your world.”

These flower photos make excellent subjects to work from, to practice drawing fluid lines and the shading of round forms.

Here’s a student work in graphite, about 12”x18.”

When the color photo is Xeroxed in black/white, it’s easier for the student to see the tonal values, since part of the work has already been done by eliminating color.

The book is easy to get online and it’s inexpensive. You can also find some of these flower images at

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk02oupxlpD-j3izaofSkMqzO847GNQ:1593207610303&source=univ&tbm=isch&q=barbara+bordnick+flowers&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1j6ntuKDqAhVFOs0KHQzqA2sQ7Al6BAgCEB0&biw=1536&bih=848

 

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