The Final Touch

This painting is almost finished.  Almost.  The eye flows nicely through this atmospheric, impressionistic bit of landscape. We’re not stuck on any part and that’s good.  The four red blooming dashes in the lower half circle nicely around the middle.  Oh, the middle.  What’s that there?  A red smudge, not as articulated as the four but relating to them by virtue of its color.  Ermmm, that doesn’t work, can’t have that in the middle of the painting, such an important focus of the work, and besides it destroys the pattern of “the four.”

Notice that when that red smudge in the middle is subdued, the painting feels resolved.

Elaine C., Untitled, oil on canvas, about 14”x 18”

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Inspired by Turner

I presented the ideas of Johannes Itten in that class (see previous post) and also the paintings of Turner.

Art historians discuss Turner in connection with the aesthetic of the Sublime, a central idea in Romanticism.  The Sublime was opposed to beauty, restraint, balance, harmony.  Romantic poets felt tormented by infinite longing and passion that could not be contained.  In their debates about form and content , form lost its former respect.  The content of turbulent emotion and the newly discovered dark aspects of the psyche—not as sin but as depth and authenticity—were seen to correspond to the awe and terror of natural forces , such as mountains and oceans.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 –1851) is famous for his seascapes, which are most often turbulent and terrifying:  burning ships; ship wrecks; drowning, shackled slaves; blazing orange skies. Though he was a member of the Royal Academy, he had to endure much ridicule from his contemporaries who preferred polite, sedate , well-ordered pictures to be mollified by.

Turner also painted landscapes.  He hated the color green and painted landscapes while avoiding that color.  What is a landscape?  We keep coming back to that question in my landscape class.  Turner assures us that it’s not about the color green.

I didn’t present the Sublime in class.  Just looking at Turner gives you goose bumps and you GET it.  Elaine C. again faced a white canvas by putting down color and letting the form follow.  This is a small painting, about 12 x 16.  If it were 48 x 64, it would pull us into the Romantic Sublime.

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Tall and Skinny “Untitled”

We don’t often see this format in painting, tall and skinny. This is the kind of proportion you are likely to get if you take a collage as your point of departure.  The collage that Elaine C. worked from was a small passage, about  1¼” x 3”,   isolated from a larger collage.  This proportion does not come in readymade frames.  No problem, there are other supports.  Artists have painted on board for centuries.  Elaine chose sanded, knot-free plywood.  I encourage this sort of departure from the “readymade” in my classes.

The colors in the collage were black and red with a snippet of green.  As she started painting, she planned on layering the paint, using under-painting.  The under-painting for the red was green.  But then the green became textural and drippy and too interesting to cover up.  The painting process took over and the original inspiration, the collage in black and red, had served its purpose and was surpassed.

The painting (48” x 20”) holds our attention because of its luminous colors, its texture and its play on the figure-ground question.

Let me expand on that last point a bit.  The question is, what’s on top of what?  The light green diamond at #1 is undoubtedly  the topmost element.  We see it that way because it is a clearly identifiable shape that we see in its entirety.  Everything else is fragmentary and our perception keeps shifting: is the green on top of the orange or the orange on top of the green?  We tend to read warm colors (orange in this case) as coming forward and cool colors (green) as receding.  But here we read the green as on top because of #5, which connects to the main orange mass (#4) and makes us read orange as the back ground.  This in itself creates tension, since we want to read the cool green as background.  But the orange keeps coming forward, not only because it’s a warm color, but also because of its shape:  it pushes its convex bays into the green at #3, #4 and #5.  Convex shapes invade and assert themselves as dominant.

But notice the little black square in the upper right at #6.  That was the last thing Elaine painted.  “It needs something up there,” she said.  Yes, it did.  And look what that little black square does.  It is an absolute—black!—and it’s the only element defined by clean straight edges.  You can’t ignore it.  Your eye keeps moving up to that corner.  After you’ve gone back and forth with the green-orange-foreground-background question for a while, that little black square throws you another mystery.  Is IT what’s behind all the color, is IT the ground?  Must be.  Since it’s cut off by the picture’s edge it looks like it’s part of something bigger.  But it’s disturbing, that the ultimate background in this painting is represented by such a tiny surface.   Disturbing, but not overwhelmingly so.  That’s just it: all this subtle tension in the midst of this luminous, glorious color and the captivating texture.

The next post will relate this painting to a 19^th century painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

For more on working from collages, go to “collage” under Categories.

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Naming the Abstract

Elaine C. called this painting “Untitled” when she submitted it for the student show at the Evanston Art Center. There must be thousands of painting in the world by that name. That ”Untitled” is the best name for this painting becomes evident when you consider some alternatives. Since the painting was made in a class called “Impressions of Landscape,” she might have named it:Red Marble,  Red Mountain in the Distance, Landscape in Red and Green, The White Horizon.   Some artists name their paintings according to concepts or states of mind, such as: Orientation,  Oder and Chaos, The Strait and the Crooked,  Where Are We Going,  Fissures.

Make up your own. You’ll see that the name of the painting prejudices the way you see the work. Your mind will welcome any verbal guidelines because its job is to seek meaning. If you can translate the painting into words, you can walk away feeling smart. So you think. In high school English class your teacher asked you to paraphrase the issue in “A Road Not Taken” and you got an A on that paper. What a catastrophe. A work of art cannot be paraphrased, cannot be distilled down to its dead-concept “essence.”

Schopenhauer said, “All art aspires to the conditions of music.” That’s a powerful statement. He’s saying that art is about form and experience. We don’t paraphrase or summarize a piece of music. We experience it. Granted some symphonies get nicknames, but generally they are known by their numbers. The Beethoven Fifth, the Mahler Fourth, et al. Elaine was wise in sticking to “Untitled.” She’s saying, look at it, contemplate it, experience it.

The painting originated with a small collage, about 2”x3”. It was complicated to paint: the tuning of the reds and greens relative to one another; working with masking tape for the straight lines; the issue of clean edges vs. grainy edges; the illusion of a vanishing point outside the painting; the “marbling” (!) of the red.

This painting strikes me as very musical indeed. It sets up a counterpoint between the red area with its texture and the celadon-green-black passage with its stripes. That’s as verbal as I want to get about it, though the technical details are interesting and were discussed in class in the context of desirable or undesirable effects.   It doesn’t refer to anything or illustrate anything. It cannot be paraphrased. It exists as an object in its own right. I just want to look at it and let it absorb me.

For previous posts on the subject of collage and abstract painting, see Nov 15, 2010 and Dec 14, 16 and 22, 2010; Jan 8, May 3,8 and 20, 2011. In a future post I want to talk about Mondrian and “essence.”

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Skies over Tahiti

Sunsets and cloud formations often take our breath away.  We stop walking, stop pedaling and stop driving so that we can give in to shameless gaping, all sophistication abandoned.  What we’re looking at are light rays and water vapors.  Light rays bending over the horizon and water vapors clumping in the troposphere, however well we may understand the physics that produce the effects, will still stop us in our tracks.  For centuries, light has been a metaphor in our literature and art for concepts like hope, transcendence and peace.  In the late 18^th century, with the rise of Romanticism and then the sense of the Sublime in the early 19^th century, light effects and cloud formations became major rock stars on the stage of the poetic imagination.

The Hudson River Valley painters are a great example.  Thomas Moran (1837-1926), for example, painted awe-inspiring landscapes, often of enormous dimensions and involving spectacular cloud formations and light effects.

But a painting of rays and vapors often falls flat.  Think of the sentimental sunset paintings you’ve winced at while strolling through a summer art fair.  You want to say, dude, the 19^th century is like so yesterday. We still love the real thing, the sunset, but our notion of painting has taken a sharp turn.  A hundred years of abstraction have taught us that the painting is an artifact. We have come to appreciate the power of composition and we are less likely to be manipulated by the sentimental intentions of Sunday painters.

In walks Elaine C. with her photos of Tahiti.  Breathtaking, if you imagine what it must have been like to be there.  We spread out these wonderful photos and looked in amazement and a little envy.  But the task at hand was to stop gasping and set to work on making a painting!  Lo and behold, in her display of 4 x 6 photos, there was this one, where the clouds and the mountain range had gotten together that magical romantic evening in Tahiti to form the wildest, most dynamic composition possible: the Z.  It’s quite uncanny.  It’s this rigorous geometry that rescues the composition from the sobs and sighs of sentimentality.  The work on this painting (16 x 20) was difficult and time consuming because the artist/student had to reconcile two opposites:  the amorphous, soft form of clouds and the distinct zig-zag of the overall composition.

In the Tahiti photo, the bottom of the frame shows a body of water, but in the painting this sliver becomes  an expanse of green meadow—for the sake of color.  We can do that because we’re painters.

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