Fall V, & Fall VI

both are 20" x 16", oil on panel

While tending to my show I took time to go to the MoMA to see Van Gogh, and the Colors of the Night, up through January 9th. His blues bite like dark chocolate, luscious with an edge. For the first time ever I stared at a painting (The Sower) so intently that my eyes began burning and my nose started running. I love the timelessness of art or the timefullness of it, that a painting made over a hundred years ago can enter my immediate experience and make me feel so much. Van Gogh layered strokes, weaving color, making land/light/substance, yet still of that paste, passionately applied. So much sensation, so much meaning was packed into that material.

I recently saw the BBC production about the paintings of the child artist, Marla Olmstead, from Binghamton, NY. The director of the gallery representing her, Anthony Brunelli, is a photo-realist painter who admitted to not fully appreciating the work of famous abstract artists such as Jackson Pollock. It is funny to me that he could appreciate Marla's but not the critically acclaimed artists, commenting that their fame was mostly due to marketing.

The absence of a recognizable subject is often a stumbling block for many viewers and often they will try to pull out forms like looking for pictures in clouds thinking they have unlocked the big mystery. A buyer of Marla's work observing a brushstroke of rectangular blue paint, insisted she had painted a picture of a door. I have to tell you that this line of thinking makes painters' eyes roll.

While I'm not about to claim that Marla's work is on par with Van Gogh and Pollock (I have never seen it in real life), my point is that people responded to her work because of its clarity, spontaneity, and evident joy in handling the material. This can be said of all three artists, Van Gogh using the form of a landscape and Pollock using color, viscosity, scale, speed, etc.

I have worked in both manners, abstract and figurative, and often find myself with a foot in each. I believe have made a comfortable synthesis. Not verbose (despite this blog!), I like the way abstraction conveys the essence of something. This week I met an older woman who would like to take watercolor classes but is afraid her tremor from her medication would interfere. She didn't want to work on something for a long time and then make a mistake, ruining it. I told her that there are other ways of working with watercolor, that it can be fluid and not so tight. The images of what she thought watercolor paintings should look like held her back and I don' t think she could see another way.

Artists become visionary when they can see beyond the cliches. Like all children, Marla is too young to know about the cliches and that may be where the freshness comes in her work. It is why Picasso said artists should draw like children. When she is older she will become more self-conscious. If she pursues painting, she will have to learn to unlearn, i.e. learn to see for herself. That is why painting can be so hard. That is why we celebrate the achievements of mature artists.