Gallery Experience

Here’s the fifth piece in this simulation of a gallery experience. When you go to a solo-show, you get drawn into this person’s sensibility. What kind of perception and thinking is going on here? You immerse yourself in these canvases, you’re puzzled, surprised, delighted, confused. You feel your brain is getting a bit of a scrubbing and you like how that feels. You may walk out more alert, seeing colors and shapes more vividly. Or powerfully moved, challenged to change your life, even. You may feel you should buy one of these paintings, live with it, relive those surprises and challenges, converse with it and let it open you to possibilities. This happens. Art is powerful that way.
Not with decoration. A decorative piece will make you feel comfortable and complacent and, of course, you like that. Helps with digestion, don’t you know. But art is something else. Art is part of how you develop and developing is work.
To get what I’m getting at here, you may need to get messy, sign up for a class and face the process. Get it? Experience! Btw, contrary to popular myth, art classes are not relaxing. Slug it out with the Apollonian and Dionysian for three hours and you’ll be ready for a nap. And that’s a wonderful experience.

As the teacher I have the added pleasure and privilege of witnessing the development of my students’ paintings.
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The Chicago Picasso

Picasso didn’t like to travel.  When he was in his twenties he would go back to his native Spain every now and then, but always with his painting materials.   Later, when he was absurdly rich and able to go anywhere in the world, he preferred to stay close to his studio.  He worked.  He worked every day.  He died April 8, 1973 shortly after getting up at 11 a.m. after having worked til four in the morning.

Jacques Brownson was the architect who designed the heroic, modernist Daley Center with the firm Loebl Schlossman and Bennett.  Richard Bennett, a partner in the firm, asked Picasso to create a sculpture for the plaza, to be its “spirit.”  Good choice: go to the co-inventer (with Georges Braque, let’s not forget) of cubism.  Picasso, knowing that he would not accept any commission because he intended this to be a gift to the city of Chicago (he never visited), set to work.  I don’t know how many sketches he made, but the visitor guide at the Art Institute features six of them on its cover.  I love the fact that we honor the work in progress.

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Picasso and the Woman Ironing

Today is Picasso’s birthday.

Yesterday the New York Times ran a two-page article about the analysis of his 1904 painting “Woman Ironing” which shows that it is painted over another painting, a portrait study, also by Picasso. Strapped for cash, he regarded the older, unfinished painting as mere canvas.

Go to http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/25/arts/design/hidden-picasso.html?ref=design to see the unfinished portrait of a man painted two or three years earlier.  (The image could not be copied and saved to file.)

The identity of the man is not nearly as interesting (though that is what fascinates the scholars and technicians who worked on this case) as the fact that Picasso abandoned the project and two years later thought it worthless.

The painting hidden under “Woman Ironing” is a competent study, of course.  Picasso had mastered all skills of drawing and painting by the age of fourteen.  Conventional portrait painting would have brought in a comfortable living. But Picasso, age twenty-two, did not allow himself to be satisfied with his prodigious technical skills. He was penniless and lived in a hovel.  He did not cave in.  The old way of seeing the world had to be abandoned.  How? And can you even do that?  And what will be the new way?  You sure?  Of course not.  But there is no evidence that Picasso ever doubted. His inability to doubt himself is not to be equated with complacency, however.  He worked every day of his life, long hours, way into the night.  He died April 8, 1973, shortly after getting up at 11 a.m., having worked, as usual, until 4 a.m.

Find the full NYtimes article at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/arts/design/under-a-picasso-painting-another-picasso-painting.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hpw

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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