artamaze by Katherine Hilden

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?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

Attention

Posted in Composition, literalness, Pattern, Quotes, Seeing, Technique and Demo, Therapy, tagged attention, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Nicolas Malebranche on November 24, 2020| 1 Comment »

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

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/fairfield-porter-and-your-interesting-junk-mail/

Artspeak, Then

Posted in Cubism, Quotes, Semiotics, tagged Art in its Own Terms., Art Journal, Fairfield Porter, Jackson Pollack, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec on October 27, 2020| 1 Comment »

We’ve met Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) before, back in August:

Surprisingly, while he was a hugely successful painter, Porter thought of himself primarily as an art critic. His criticism was featured in Art Journal, which was started in 1941. The book, Art in its Own Terms, is a selection of his critical writings, edited by the itchingly named Rackstraw Downes. I scratched around in these pages and found some insights about Artspeak, then and now.

In the 1940’s New York Abstract Expressionism had hit America’s culture fan with shocking force. It must have felt like a threat to common decency, meaning American decency. In 1959, for example, the popular, middle-brow Life Magazine called Jackson Pollack “Jack the Dripper.” But fairly high-brow readers were also puzzled. These were the cultured-and-curious who would have read Art Journal to find some guiding thread through this new art mess.

Who better for the job than someone who knew art from within, a painter who could convincingly use the word “soul” and still could articulate his way through the maze of these new art-isms.

I imagine that if you could memorize a few of Porter’s sentences and quote them at the next cocktail party (it was the 50’s), you would be assured that you looked as smart as your suede pumps.

Who could challenge a quote like, “Polish artists admire American painting, and Russian art circles take time to express disapproval”? If you said “Picasso derives from Toulouse-Lautrec,” would the hostess whip out a screen and a Kodak Carousel complete with relevant slides so that you could demonstrate exactly what you were talking about? She would not. She would pour you more champagne, darling, aren’t you clever.

Was Porter ever asked to give a slide show at the 92nd Street Y to illuminate his generalities? Today he would be asked. Today he would be expected to present split screen comparisons and be specific about what he was comparing to what. By the time of the Q&A people would have fact-checked his historical claims and editorial generalities.

Here’s a split screen for the claim that Picasso derives from Toulouse-Lautrec. He would have some splainin’ to do, wouldn’t he.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1864-1901

Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973

Fairfield Porter, 1907-1975

Mary Heaton Vorse and the Art of Drawing

Posted in Achievement, Quotes, tagged art practice, drawing, learning to draw, Mary Heaton Vorse, The Paris Review on July 24, 2020| 2 Comments »

VorseMayHeaton565 She was an American journalist, labor activist, social critic, and novelist. I came across her recently while checking on literary publications to see what they were up to these days.

Mary Heaton Vorse, 1874-1966, has been recently rediscovered after long neglect. So I drew her for my facefame blog. While reading about her, I found this quote from her:

“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

We can substitute “drawing’ for “writing” and get:

“The art of drawing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

So true. Thank you, Ms. Vorse.

What Four?

Posted in abstraction, Architecture, Color, Illustration, Imagination, literalness, Quotes, Semiotics, Technique and Demo, tagged 17th century, Art in America, Artforum, Cezanne, Germany, Gutenberg, Holland, Mainz, Manet, Matisse, MoMA, Nicolaes Maes, Picasso, process, Renaissance, VanGogh on September 14, 2015| Leave a Comment »

You’re not inclined to interpret this painting. You’re probably not asking “what is the significance of the number four, what does it symbolize or refer to, what is the sum of all the fours here and what would be the meaning of that large number, ditto for multiplication,” etc. This kind of interpreting is what we used to do. For example, when you look at this painting by Nicolaes Maes, you can’t help but try to figure out what the artist is illustrating. Why did the artist put in the cat, the sleeping maid, the guests in the background? What is the hostess saying to us by gesturing that way? What was the social status of servants in mid-17th-century Holland?
We stopped digging for meaning about a hundred years ago. I recently found this 1923 Picasso quote in an announcement of the current MoMA show: “Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird?”
If this sounds perverse, it’s because prior to about 1900 images were used for didactic purposes and that’s what we got used to. They illustrated a story, a myth, a compositional ideal, an ideal ratio, an ideal body, an ideal color relation, etc. Ideals are culturally defined and over time get enshrined as absolute and immovable. By the early 20th century, these ossified standards were crumbling in Western culture: in the place of capital-t Truth we got evolution, relativity, psychoanalysis and the leveling of social classes. This is not to say that Cézanne, Manet, VanGogh, Matisse and Picasso were now illustrating these new theories. Not at all. They painted in a new way because to be alive at that time felt new.
The major societal shift involved the relationship between artist and client. Whereas before, the artist was a servant, he is now of the same middle class as his client. Whereas before, the client (pope, emperor, czar, king, archbishop, et al) was interested in the finished product and how it promoted his power status, now the client becomes more and more interested in how the work is put together and what philosophical dynamics those artistic processes embody. Whereas before, the work of art “appeared” in a mythical sense, like Athena from the head of Zeus, now the painting or sculpture shows the traces –the brush strokes, the chisel marks, the scratches, the nuts and bolts—of how it was made.
This is why the reviewers of art exhibits and the critics in art magazines like Art in America and Artforum will write at great length about the process that went into the making of the work of art. Most of the writing does not attempt interpretation of the pre-19th century kind at all. It’s assumed that you, as a contemporary, love process. You love to stand in front of a painting or sculpture and try to figure out how the artist made this thing. Reconstructing the process will trigger empathy with the artist, will vicariously pump you up with energy and, generally, make your day. Later you’ll meet a friend for lunch and, gesturing energetically,try to convey your aesthetic experience.
Well then, what was the process behind “What Four?” You can see that the painting, 30” x 40”, started as a color study: blue/purple and greens. What followed was only one layer of paint, but a layer produced through complex procedure. The artist, Jane Donaldson, decided to mix media. The first layer is painting. This second layer is printmaking. She carved the letter four on a linoleum plate. She painted it white and pressed it onto the canvas, one four after the other, until the white paint was worn from the plate. She now inked the plate again and started another set of “four,” and so on.
I find this very exciting. It has something child-like about it, but at the same time it hearkens back to that incision in Western civilization when in 1439 Johannes Gutenberg invented printing in Mainz, Germany, and literature was able to take off. Without printing, no Renaissance, without the Renaissance, well, you know, on and on.
That’s one of the chain reactions set off in the mind. There are others, because the process of decline/degeneration/fading and rejuvenation/fresh start is so true to the experience of life. The process tempts you to interpret metaphorically, but remains unspecific. It reverberates deeply in the imagination because it is visually rich. That richness comes from its process.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Fish in Water, Paying Attention

Posted in Imagination, Quotes, Seeing, Therapy, tagged David Foster Wallace, Elmhurst Art Museum, Kenyon College, Laurie Anderson on August 31, 2015| Leave a Comment »

That’s the sign on the side of the Elmhurst Art Museum. Notice it’s bright yellow, like signage on highways that are designed to keep you alert.

With great wit, David Foster Wallace gave this attention message in a commencement speech at Kenyon. “This is Water:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

Seeing Something Awful

Posted in abstraction, Failed Effort, inspiration, Quotes, Romantic, Technique and Demo, tagged Alfred Oehlen, New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl on August 30, 2015| 3 Comments »

“People don’t realize that when you are working on a painting, every day you are seeing something awful,” Albert Oehlen said in an interview with Peter Schjeldahl from the New Yorker. I burst out laughing when I read that. I don’t mean, that Oehlen was joking, not at all. What he said was funny because it’s the truth, but so awful a truth, that nobody wants to come out and say it. Once you hear somebody say that, you have to admit it’s true. It has to be true. If a panting looked wonderful after the first splash of paint, it would be done. While that can happen once in a rare while, we know that artists work on a painting for hours, days, sometimes weeks and months. During all that time, they would have to be dissatisfied with what they’re looking at, otherwise….it’s obvious. So, what drives the artist is that, as Oehlen says, he’s looking at something awful.
This is not how the public sees artists’ work. The public prefers the kitschy, idealized image of the smock wearing, beret topped artist who merely channels “inspiration.” Ha.
The dramatic mood of the work is comic, beset by existential worry, Oehlen continued. It’s as if each picture wondered, “What am I? Am I even art? O.K., but what does that mean?”
The article by Peter Schjeldahl appeared in the New Yorker, June 22, 2015, p82.
More paintings by Albert Oehlen at https://www.google.com/search?q=albert+oehlen&biw=1321&bih=796&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0CI0BEIkeahUKEwirxaLszdHHAhVKeT4KHWRkBpQ
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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http://www.katherinehilden.com
http://www.khilden.com

Henri Henri Matisse, Amélie and the Woman with a Hat

Posted in Color, Imagination, inspiration, literalness, Quotes, Seeing, tagged Amelie Matisse, Bohain, Collioure, color, Corsica, Derain, divisionism, Donatello, Duc du Berry, Ecole des Beauz Arts, en grisaille, Fauves, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, Leo Stein, Louis Vauxcelles, Paris, Paul Signac, pointilism, Pyrinees, Robert Hubert, Salon d'Automn, Vlaminck on November 8, 2014| 2 Comments »

Amélie Parayre married Henri Matisse in January 1898. Part of her family came from Corsica. Since Henri’s career wasn’t going too well in freezing Paris, they spent their honeymoon in sunny Corsica. For Matisse it was work as usual. He produced fifty-five paintings in those five months. What’s important is not the prodigious output, but that he GOT COLOR: “Soon there came to me, like a revelation, the love of materials for their own sake. I felt growing within me a passion for color.”
Well, you might say, he was twenty-eight, what took him so long? We take it for granted that not only painting but our daily lives are filled with color and we assume that it was ever thus. The sky’s been blue, the grass green and flowers in flowery colors since the dinosaurs. That’s true, but cloth for clothing and furnishings was dreary and drab until very recently, specifically the second half of the 19th century, when analine dyes were invented. Prior to that only king and gods could afford color. Everyone else slogged around in browns and grays.
We can see this reflected in the illuminations of the 14th and 15th century and in Renaissance paintings, which depict only the rich and divine and therefore give us color to enjoy. But there was also a tradition of painting that honored the browns and considered them noble, dignified, stately, eternal. The Ecole des Beaux Arts, the Salon and their powerful judges looked down on color. In drawing classes, for example, color was expressly forbidden. So was working from nature. Students worked strictly from plaster casts and en grisaille (in shades of gray).
Matisse grew up in the north of France, in Bohain, a drab, cold, confining town where the main industry was weaving textiles and growing beets. After he dabbled with the little paint set his mother had given him, he knew that he wanted to become a painter. At twenty he went to Paris, where he abandoned his law studies and struggled for fifteen years before anyone bought a painting from him. His Corsica “revelation” about color was reinforced by an older artist living in the south, Paul Signac, who worked in a style called Divisionism, later known as Pointilism. Lucky for us, Matisse stuck with it.
In 1905 he worked for a few month in Collioure in the foothills of the Pyrenees. That fall he submitted to the Salon d’Automne exhibit two paintings made in that southern light. They were hung in the then infamous Salle VII, where visitors gestured obscenely and doubled over in derisive laughter. The critic Louis Vauxcelles noticed a couple of conventional, academic sculpture in the room and made the now famous wisecrack: “a Donatello among the wild beasts.” Fauves, French for wild beasts, became the nickname for a group of artists, including Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Matisse liked the name: “Frankly, it was admirable. The name of Fauve could hardly have been better suited to our frame of mind.” They were artists who felt that art made of shades of brown and gray was passé. They didn’t know where their experiments would lead, but they knew it was time for a revolution that would replace the worn out pictorial language of the 19th century.

One of those two Matisse paintings sold. Woman with a Hat was priced at 500 francs and an offer came in for 300. Henri and Amélie Matisse were flat broke. They had three children, who needed winter coats. Amélie wouldn’t accept the 300. They waited. The prospective buyer agreed to pay the full 500. He was Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude Stein from San Francisco.
The Steins thought the new pictorial language might just be the next big thing and might be worth investing in. By investing in it, they made it happen.
Stay tuned.

Henri Matisse, 1869-1954. The Open Window, Collioure, 1905. Woman with a Hat, 1905.

Paul Signac, 1863-1935Robert Hubert, 1733-1808 Les très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1412-1416