Spring #11 May Field

oil on panel

6" x 12"

  "I can do whatever I want any old time."

  Post-modernism is a distrust of established canons in art but not limited to art.  It re-evaluates all western values.  The effects of this movement caused a paradigm shift prompting discord with conservatives here and abroad from right-wing Christians to the Taliban.  Examples of artistic deconstruction of traditional artistic practice are the Dada Movement (Duchamp), Fluxus, and Performance Art to name a few.  One act which shocked and then delighted me is when in 1952 Willem DeKooning erased a Robert Rauschenberg drawing.  It seemed like vandalism rebelling against a statement, negating it, pushing a fellow artist off the top of a mound like an alpha male. It was a collaboration, Rauschenberg approached DeKooning who didn't like the idea, reconsidered, and then said he wanted it to be "something he would miss."  It is an example of letting things go.  In drawing one can erase as much as draw, and additive and subtractive method as in sculpture, so this action still has its roots in traditional art.  DeKooning picked a picture with oil paint in it so it took Rauschenberg a month to erase it.  The work elicited a scandal. This interview with Rauschenberg about the event is very interesting.

  My work is fairly traditional as all painting tends to be seen now.  I vacillate in my approach as I don't feel the need to adhere to any rigid definition and can paint as I please.  While I have responsibilities like everyone else, artistically I feel as the Rolling Stones say in I'm Free, "I'm free to do what I want any old time."  It's something one wants to shut.  Even if one's song (one's creative output, oneself) is imperfect, out of time, there is value in it.  Written in the sixties, the song's reference to love reflects the need for acceptance despite social rebellion, the desire to be loved as is.

  On one of his visits to Penn, painter/teacher/critic Andrew Forge asked all of us young painters if we could think of a painter who Pollock [a fun Pollock inspired website lets you move your curser to make Pollock drip patterns] makes us see in a new way.  Also what particular qualities do we see anew?  The questions show how contemporary life can inform how we view history just as history reaches out into the present.  It is impossible to be extricated from one's time.  I said that Pollock changes how we see Vuillard in terms of passion and movement in paint handling as well as pattern.

  Despite artistic freedom, our time leaves its mark.  It is said that Americans have such a rich range of experiences and viewpoints but when an American is in a different country, say a Texan and a Connecticut Yankee, they are unified and easily identified by some quality that is strictly American.  My work shares this phenomenon.  It is American but its hard to say why.  Maybe its the aspect of freedom and the particular places I paint.  While having parameters, a set of "givens" (elements of design, a surface to paint on, etc.) there is choice.  "I'm free to do what I want..."

Spring #10 April Hudson River

oil on canvas

54" x 42"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

I'm a little freaked out to tell you the truth.  I'm a little worried now that I've seen Art Weekly on a couple different monitors that some of you are seeing these overexposed.  The tablet laptop I started this on had a screen that could tilt, thus altering the brightness of the image with its angle.  Now I'm on an HP monitor for a Mac Mini and it doesn't tilt.  I cringe when I see the pictures on the blog so bright, but I don't want to change things now because you all have different computers out there and I think I just have to deal.  Alright, let's move on.

Spring #10 April Hudson River  is done from a colored pencil sketch I did on an Amtrak train from Rochester to Penn Station NYC.  The day was hazy and the colors in between the color-suck of winter and the fireworks of spring.  I think I made my own fireworks with the vibrancy of the tree line and the blue circles of water (can't quite call them droplets) coming at the viewer.  The painting makes use of linear and atmospheric perspective.  Dark gray/black dots seem connected like beads on a string or buoys.  The water had that range of silver, dark and light blues that went to purple, and white sparkles.  The hazy dots at the top gently fall down, shimmering, obscuring the hilltop.  You know, I don't think the Hudson River was quite this active, maybe it's me.

For more information on the Hudson River Valley, check out:

http://www.scenichudson.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_River

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm

Aerial View in Google Maps

Spring #9 (So Many Greens)

18" x 24"

oil on panel

As I paint dots I'm looking at other dots in paintings as well as references to circles in all the arts.  Aboriginal paintings from Australia are typically constructed of dots.  Some are done on bark. The bark connotes such a strong connection with nature that it is the substance of the image. Rather than depicting their surroundings in a literal way, the subjects are abstracted but often show nature via animals, fish, people, etc.  I found a source for their symbols.  The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia has the largest collection of indigenous Australian art outside of Australia. 

Spring #9 (So Many Greens) draws heavily on visual perception done from direct observation, thus differing from Aboriginal art.  The commonalities are rhythm, nature, immersion in a particular place and way of life, and the abstract element of the dot as a vehicle for these things.  The greens can be spliced and spliced towards yellow, blue, violet, light and dark, etc.  Even the most representational painters have to simplify.  My family often looks out on such scenes from our dining room window as we eat meals together.  My son says that the greens are actually overwhelming from the window view but not when one is outside.  It is funny but it is like being overstimulated by flashing lights in a big city.  The painting is perhaps a bit less hyperactive due to its abstraction/simplification, my processing.  Some dots are more subtle than others like the ones in the sky.  I'm looking forward to looking at it through the winter.

Spring 5 (Cabbage Field), Spring 7 (First Green), & Spring 8 (Through the Shower Door)

8"x 10"
6" x 12"

oil on panel

Maybe it is spring moving onto summer where you are, but I'm freezing my butt off with my fellow Rochesterians. It's been in the 50's and 60's lately which would have been thrilling in February but is now getting old. I stumbled upon the poem Early Spring by Rainer Maria Rilke (www.poemhunter.com is a really great site for poetry). It is about the moment when the harshness of winter and its grey are replaced by "country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees". This is the moment and subject I'm painting.

Rilke (German) falls into the category of Romanticism (1800-mid c.) which emphasized imagination and emotion as well as originality of the artist, a reaction to the reason and order of the Enlightenment after the French Revolution. Even though structure can be found in nature it was still seen as an alternative to order in its wildness (great article by Kathryn Calley Galitz, Department of 19th c. Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met). Art wasn't simply a mirror of nature anymore but also related to one's inner self. I haven't read anything reaching the conclusion that this wildness expressed the inner self, but would venture that it would after the perhaps restricting Enlightenment. Examples of Romanticism in America are the Hudson River School. Other European artists include Turner and Gericault and the poet Byron.

How did we get here after complaining that my butt is cold?! I think my painting comes out of Romanticism, although it was pejorative to be called "Romantic" in graduate school. I think that kind of romantic was the extreme, saccharine Hallmark. Painting a fluffy kitten might have been grounds for expulsion. I think my work is romantic in a similar way to the music of Andreas Sahar, which has emotion and originality as two of its many strengths. The song Take to the Sky references nature in a charged, uplifting way I can relate to. Perhaps the landscapes I paint are a tinge romanticised, but I prefer to think celebrated. Truth be told, a cabbage field looks beautiful but smells way worse than a farm full of manure.

Spring #8 was inspired by looking through my steamy glass shower door and then at the landscape through the bathroom window. My bathroom walls are turquoise and the lawn outside provided a field of spring green, a favorite of mine. The humidity provided watery distortion, effected the color, and made me think of Florida.