artamaze by Katherine Hilden

Tejo Remy

Posted in Imagination, Seeing, Semiotics, Surreal, tagged breakfront, chair, Indianapolis Museum of Art, irony, Phaidon, Rag Chair, Tejo Remy, You Can't Lay Down Your Memories on April 1, 2021| 2 Comments »

Is this a joke?

Looks like something you could sit on if you had to. But wait, is that a bunch of old rags?

Tejo Remy is a Dutch designer. His 1991 Rag Chair “is created from layered clothing and discarded rags. The reused textiles are collected and shaped with black metal straps to form a large, bulky and eccentric lounge chair. The concept behind the chair is to provide a unique piece of furniture, while at the same time providing a collection of memories that can be flipped through and treasured.”* Every chair is different, of course, and can be custom made for you from your old clothes.

He also designs chests of drawers, called “You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories,” which are composed of random drawers bundled together by metal straps.

As you look at these, both the chair and the drawers, do you get the feeling that what might be operating here is irony?

In the case of the chair, if you really treasured your old clothes and the memories they associate to, you would preserve them in a more, shall we say, loving way. You might re-tailor a jacket or a skirt for whimsical evening wear, to go to the theater, say. You could engage a quilter to go wild with her imagination or donate your stuff to a painter friend for incorporation in a mixed medium piece. Such re-purposing comes with a dose of irony, sure, but it would be irony cultivated out of a sense of history, melancholy and affirmation.

The bundled up drawers are even more ironic than the Rag Chair because they come with a didactic name attached: ‘You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories.” You’re saying I’m trying to lay down my memories? But I can’t?! You’re saying, memories are all a jumble and they will never fall into place in an orderly pattern that makes sense. Might as well face it and live with the randomness that is called your memories.

If your past—personal, social, historical—makes sense and was orderly, then you will have a place for everything and everything in its place. You will be offended by Remy’s pile of mismatched drawers. You will restore and treasure an antique breakfront or china cabinet. Like this, perhaps.

Both the Rag Chair and “You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories” are in museum collections and valued in the thousands. These designs are freighted with, yes, irony, which means you are being challenged to think and interpret.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has a Remy Rag Chair. Next time I go there I’ll hover around the Rag Chair waiting to hear someone say to a spouse, Oh, honey we’ve got to have one of these, perfect for the TV room, looks cheap and the kids wouldn’t have to be careful. That won’t happen. People will continue to look confused and challenged by modernism.

Next, we’ll look at our contemporary need for re-purposing.

In the meantime, allow yourself to be fooled by something today, this April First.

*Quoted from Chair—500 Designs that Matter. Phaidon.

Tejo Remy, b. 1960

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n19/t.j.-clark/strange-apprentice

Cézanne, Pissaro and T.J. Clark

Posted in Achievement, Color, Composition, Landscape, Seeing, Semiotics, Technique and Demo, tagged Camille Pissaro, Le Bassin du Jas de Bouffan, London Review of Books, Maison et arbre, modernism, Paul Cézanne, T.J. Clark on March 28, 2021| 2 Comments »

Cézanne, Le Bassin du Jas de Bouffan, c. 1876

Last year’s October 8 issue of the London Review of Books published a long (just under 9,000 words) article by the art historian T.J. Clark, who has taught at British universities as well as at the University of California, L.A.

I am reproducing one of the seven pages to give you an idea of the tone of this piece. (Click image for readable enlargement) For those of you who can’t get enough of this kind of hand-waving erudition, here’s the whole article:

I do recommend reading it in its entirety if you are interested in how various scholars have dated some paintings, how Pissaro and Cézanne worked together and how blind Clark is to what’s happening in these paintings.

He is only interested in that pre-modern obsession with the “quality of light:” Cézanne has pinned down a particular kind of light here—sometimes I feel in the painting even a specific time of day, an early evening transparency answering back to Le Champ de choux’s thickening and diffusion.

Cézanne is the grand-daddy of modern painting. You’re being absurd and blind if you claim that he and his progeny in modernism—Picasso, Braque, Matisse et al– were interested in “pinning down a particular kind of light.”

So I submitted a letter to the LRB and got a reply saying they were considering printing it. But they didn’t. Clark’s long piece did not get the attention of any printed letter at all.

Here, then, is the letter I submitted:

If you want to rhapsodize about light in a painting then you can persuade yourself that the quality of light in Jas de Bouffan is what it’s all about. But look again and notice how Cézanne fools you.

If he were interested in painting a landscape, he would give us perspective with distant objects hazy and more faded than close up objects. Instead, the green stripes of the field are uniformly green, from close to far up on the hill. Don’t just say, ah landscape, look more critically. Start by admitting that the reflection in the basin is laughable. The reflection of the house on the hill cannot occur at the edge of the basin. The reflection of the windows does not relate to the windows on the actual house. Where’s the chimney in the reflection? Where’s the sloping shed roof? The little tree in front of that little shed? For that matter, those large blocks close to the water’s edge would have to reflect in the basin.

I don’t know what T.J.Clark means by “Modernity is loss of world.” No world is lost in Cézanne, any more than a world is lost when a magician banters your ears full as he does the rope trick while manipulating your expectations. Jas de Bouffan is a landscape– what else could it be?– but it’s also a banter of colors in a rectangle that manipulates your expectations. You accept what’s happening in the basin because you’re sentimental about reflections in water.

He places that slender gray tree exactly in the middle. On the top it’s exactly in the middle, then it curves a little. The reflection is made with the same gray so that the canvas is divided in half, from top to bottom, by this even gray brush stroke. This gray brush stroke intersects the horizontal ruler-straight line of the basin’s edge. Notice how your eye keeps coming back to this intersection, which functions like cross hairs to focus your attention. Nice. Your brain likes this clarity in the context of all this hand waiving. He situates these cross-hairs in the lower part of the canvas, which is where we expect the foreground to be. Voila! I give you a foreground and therefore the upper section must be farther away and you, dear viewer, are happy that this landscape has depth.

Using the same technique, Cézanne persuades us of a foreground in Maison et arbre. (See below) The “precipitous road and front lawn to the left,” which looks so awkward, serves the same function as the cross hairs of tree-and-basin-edge in Jas de Bouffan. This crude geometry is also in the lower part of the landscape and is also clearly delineated. Your attention can’t help but land on and linger in that lower left corner. Location and delineation tell you, this is the foreground. The green and orange fields to the right of the house are not fading into the distance—as you’d expect—but still they read as distant because the lower left corner of the road and the lawn shouts “foreground.” Again, you accept this banter of flat rectangles and triangles. You want to believe that this is a landscape with foreground, middle-ground and background. So that’s what you see.

Picasso and Braque called Cézanne their father not because of any atmospherics of light but because the canvases he filled with brushstrokes captivated attention in this new way.

When Cézanne in his 20’s lived in Paris he submitted paintings to the Salon, knowing full well he would be rejected. He did this over and over. It’s fair to assume that rejection strengthened his resolve to find some new way of relating to a canvas.

Later in Aix, when he sat on the grass and watched Pissaro painting, let’s imagine him muttering in his curmudgeonly way, “Merde, time of day and light effects…blabla…there must be more to painting than this.”

Cézanne, Maison et arbre, 1874

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2021/03/13/glowing-prairie-grasses-horizontal-view/

Glowing Prairie Grass and Vermeer

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Pattern, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged 17th century, circle, composition, ellipse, Johannes Vermeer, Little Street, prairie grass, rhythm on March 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »

After the horizontal view (discussed in the last post), I turned the camera to the vertical view. Here there’s even more to draw you in and hold your attention.

We still have the horizontal shadows with their variations. This time, though, the lines pull you to the full view of the glowing prairie grass, the drama queen in this show. Ta-tah!

The shape of the glow is roughly circular. A circle in a composition will dominate your attention. Add to that the horizontal dark ellipse under the background tree and you have a play on the variation of round forms. Your brain loves that. Then notice that that black ellipse and the glowing circle relate to each other through that tense gap between them. Tension is good, it pulls you in.

We still have the Golden Section: red lines indicated the equal sides of the big square. In addition, a number of equal distances (greens, pinks) that create repetition in the composition, a kind of rhythm.

At this point, for good company, I’m reminded of Vermeer’s Little Street. He makes the composition run on rhythm.

The nerve of him! Here he is in the 17^th century and instead of showing off how well he can create the illusion of depth through perspective and how well he can seduce you through human anatomy and ample flesh…what does he give you? A flat façade of a couple of buildings. Yes, there’s a picture within the picture with a little perspective view to the women in that passage way and the cobble stones recede, granted, but only faintly and ever so casually. There are a couple of gables in the back, but no perspective lines lead to them, so , voila, they’re part of the overall flatness.

This is a modern painting. One of us painted this. Makes me wanna cry. Yes, it’s a flat surface that runs on rhythm, like a drum roll of the same distances—all over. That’s it, I’m in tears.

You can take a strip of paper and mark off any length on this building and then move that strip around and find the same distance, over and over. That’s rhythm. It’s what mesmerizes you.

Johannes Vermeer, 1632-1675

Glowing Prairie Grasses, Horizontal View

Posted in Composition, Cropping, Landscape, Negative space, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged backlighting, composition, diagonals, golden section, shadows on March 13, 2021| 3 Comments »

My prairie grasses glow backlit in the late afternoon sun. I grab the phone, step out the front door and frame the shot.

I love this glow. Oh, how I love this glow, let me count the ways.

What I mean is, if I put the glow in the middle of the frame, the picture will die on me. When we say a picture is “dead” what we’re talking about is our attention. When an image engages your attention it’s because the composition moves your eye through the frame and lights up your brain.

I can tell you how it lit up mine.

In my first shot I took a horizontal view because of the variety of diagonal lines formed by the A) crack in the cement, B) straight line of the wall, C) shadows of the grass and D) tree in the background. That’s nice because it’s the same element (diagonal lines) expressed by different shapes and reference.

The other compositional whammo is the Golden Section. This seems to be built into my retina, because here it is again.

In summary, we have three compositional dynamics working here.

The horizontal frame establishes a tranquil, thoughtful mood.
The diagonals, varied and upward moving, are restless, energetic and optimistic.
The Golden Section anchors you in our aesthetic tradition.

How can this be a worthwhile image to look at? It’s such an ordinary subject matter. If you frame this — not cropped!– somebody coming to your house could make a face and say, are you kidding me? What if you had it as an image filling your 50” TV screen! Ha, look at that.

Consider the composition, pure and simple:

In the next post we’ll go vertical to see what can happen there.

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

An introvert again

Posted in Imagination, Negative space, Seeing, Therapy, tagged Ann Patchett, Francisco de Zurbaran, Harpers Magazine, These Precious Days on February 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

“Most of the writers and artists I know were made for sheltering in place. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice we’d rather stay home. I know how to structure my time. I can write an entire novel without showing a page of it to anyone. I can motivate myself without a deadline or a contract. I was happy, even thrilled, to stop traveling. I had spent my professional life looking at my calendar, counting down the days I had left at home. Now every engagement I had scheduled in 2020 was canceled. With each day, I felt some piece of scaffolding fall away. I no longer needed the protection. I was an introvert again.”

———from Ann Patchett, These Precious Days. Published in Harper’s Magazine, January 2021

For the full story, https://harpers.org/archive/2021/01/these-precious-days-ann-patchett-psilocybin-tom-hanks-sooki-raphael/

Cup of Water and A Rose, Francisco de Zurbarán, 1598-1664

A Compelling Image

Posted in Achievement, Composition, Landscape, Pattern, Seeing, Technique and Demo, Texture, tagged composition, landscape, Mary Shieldsmith on December 27, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Yes, I know what this is. This image shows skinny bare tree trunks in a dry hilly landscape.

What makes the stripes on the ground?

The stripes? Let’s see. Oh, the stripes are made by the shadows from the tree trunks. Must be that the sun is low on the horizon.

Kinda cool?

Yeah, pretty cool.

It’s not that you’re reminded of that afternoon in the state park, because you weren’t there, you didn’t take the photo.

It’s not that the image depicts some sexy scene.

Why is this image so compelling, even hypnotic?

Oh, I can chat about it. Try this: Lines intersecting, over and over, with variation of angle, never mechanical, never repetitious. Focused attention, like cross-hairs. Rhythm. Percussion. There is no focal point. No point of rest. Your eye is constantly moving. The effect is purely visual, purely formal, not depending on any narrative. No “appealing colors.”

If you only think this image is “pretty cool,” I suggest you frame it. Frame it large or project it on your large TV screen and look at it every day so that the memory of it will keep you awake at night without you knowing why on earth this is happening to you.

The past several posts have been about the power of composition. This image is the culmination of all these past three month of looking and thinking about images here at artamaze.

Of all the things that grab you in an image—color, narrative, symbolism, etc.—the most powerful is composition.

Try to get some sleep.

Photo by Mary Shieldsmith

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://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/11/24/attention/

Momentary Constellation

Posted in Fluxus, inspiration, Seeing, Technique and Demo, tagged attention, constellation, Derain, practicing scales on November 28, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Last post I said you can practice turning your attention to ON. Yes, you can, and it’s wise to practice.

Musicians, for example, practice. Even very advanced performers practice scales. This practice will shine through when they’re performing on stage in thrilling, ecstatic passages of a piece. The practice itself made this ecstasy possible, but the practice itself is not ecstatic. It’s discipline.

I walk into my kitchen one morning, my to-do list for that day writ large in my brain. As I turn to the fridge, my jaw drops and my eyes pop. I either had never seen this light effect before or it happens every morning but I’m just always behind in my “attention practice.”

I grab my camera and click.

This is not a great moment in the history of photography.

Why, then, is it valuable? Because it records a constellation: the alignment of

the angle of the sun
the placement of that bamboo plant
the moment I entered that room
my attention on ON

The photo reminds me that such an alignment is possible. It happened. It doesn’t happen every day and it’s worth paying attention when it does happen.

Next, we’ll look at Derain.

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