New iPad, Reflections on Artist Hitoshi Nakazato

iPad images, byNicole Maynard

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Master printmaker Hitoshi Nakazato died July 17th from a head injury due to a fall in his studio. He was seventy-four. I had the opportunity to study printmaking with Hitoshi at the University of Pennsylvania where he showed me how to do etching, lithography, and silkscreen. "He called Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania the place of his intellectual awakening," said his wife, Sumiko Takeda Nakazato. Teaching from 1971 until the present and serving as chair in the mid-nineties, he had a strong commitment to the school. Always full of stories, he told us to appreciate relationships with our peers as we journeyed through graduate school at Penn.

His paintings and prints focused on the particular placement of simple geometric shapes: the circle, triangle, and square, vibrant in color and zen-like. The Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Tokyo exhibited more than 400 of his works this summer. He was a very kind man in addition to being an artist and teacher.

Tree and Trees, My House (First Day of Summer)

Tree and Trees, 12" x 9", oil pastel




My House (First Day of Summer), 9" x 12", oil pastel

I recently went to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to see the Charles Burchfield exhibition. The Whitney tweets about the show:

Burchfield only did 27 oil paintings but thousands of watercolors. Four of the oils are on view in this exhibition.

In the 1940s Burchfield began taking earlier works & expanding on them. If you get close enough you can see where the pieces of paper join.

Later in life Burchfield suffered many ailments but still got out in nature to paint, sometimes laying on the ground due to a bad back.

Peter Schjeldahl of the @newyorker on Charles Burchfield: http://bit.ly/aGjNW6. Lovely audio slideshow: http://bit.ly/a74zBZ

Whitney Museum
http://bit.ly/PWu4l

The tweets don't mention the scale of the later watercolors, epic at my guess of 4' x 3'. Rather than using a roll of watercolor paper like Arches makes (I'm not sure that was available at the time), the papers he tapes together are smaller than 8" x 10". The color and rhythmic patterns are stunning. The specific places and weather he directly observes spin into fantasy which is the difference compared with his earlier, grayish paintings of American buildings of the time. Permitting himself to let loose, he boldly puts forth an inner vision the general populace may not understand. This is the difficulty of being a visionary, waiting for people to catch up.

The exhibit has old copies of Life and Time magazines opened to feature stories on Burchfield celebrating his depiction of American of American life via common architecture. The paintings capture a gritty feeling of manufacturing at the time, working class environments rather than the monumental achievements of sky scrapers. People saw their lives in these pictures while his assertions of his dreams were less concrete in their minds. Of course, these later watercolors are the best and his place in art history would be be diminished without them. They sometimes focus on a central space like the altar of a cathedral, not unlike the spaces I'm after. Many artists say that art museums are like church to them and even more people say the same of nature. Burchfield's paintings evoke the celebration of the divine on both counts. This interest is an expression vastly differing from the ripples of the industrial revolution. A forward thinker, his work challenges us to stay true to ourselves and to trust our instincts, artists or not.

My pastels open the door to summer day dreaming, allowing you to float away with art as a springboard. Many artists can help get you there.

- Tofu-Powered Art-Chick

Summer #7 Green Field and Sky

Summer #7 Green Field and Sky 6" x 12" oil on panel

I was attentive to using archival painting methods even as a student, dutifully gessoing canvases with four to six coats. I learned more about mold and water damage through a storage space flood in 1998. More recently, scratches, tears, and dents in large paintings in my January move are pointing me to taking out art conservation books from the library to aid me in their repair. I know it all will be dust someday but I would like a few people to see them first.

I'm reevaluating my choice of painting medium. Now I use either Windsor and Newton's Liquin or Gamblin's Galkyd Lite. I like them, no real complaints, and am unsure there is any real issue. I'm considering the argument that paint thinner does just that and perhaps weakens the archival integrity of a painting. Painter Ron Rizzi, for whom I worked as a studio assistant, thought so, at least back then. The substances used to suspend pigment for their application to a support is key in conservation. Mark Rothko's recipes are very problematic for conservators. The Rothko chapel in Houston underwent a $1.8 million renovation restoring the structure as well as the paintings which had problems due to light damage and the make up of the paint Rothko made himself.

"For the red, as well as for the plum of the seven monochromes, Rothko used pigment dissolved in warm rabbit-skin glue, which produces a thin, transparent wash of color. The rectangles, a velvety, matte black, turned out to be an egg-oil emulsion: a concoction of whole egg, oil paint, dammar resin and turpentine, made fresh each day without a recipe."

From the article, ARTS IN AMERICA; Restoring Rothko's Chapel and His Vision

By SHAILA K. DEWAN

Published: June 15, 2000

In graduate school I made a few paintings using De Kooning's recipe of safflower oil and water as a medium for oil paint. Yellow One from 1995 is an example:

44" x 36", oil on canvas

I was working in an Abstract-Expressionist style, so the slippery paint maximized the fluidity of gestural brushstrokes. I don't fully remember why I stopped using it except that I wasn't completely satisfied. De Kooning liked it because it kept paint soft and fluid, requisite for his method of painting all day and scraping off the canvas at the end so as to have a clear surface the next morning.

I've started using the paint alone with a little stand oil when needed for fluidity. I've done this before but it might work better for me now that my work is smaller and I don't have to cover such large areas.

Taking care of art objects is often difficult and sometimes painstaking. It involves the sacrifices of money, space, and time. Conservation can take longer than it did to make the art (not that time is a good measure for evaluating the quality of a picture). If I had an unlimited budget I could provide secure transport, climate controlled storage, and the choicest supplies for my work. I take good care of things, but I am compromised. It is a burden (consider this before working large) and I am resigned to the inadequate means of preservation at my disposal and accept, with some pangs, the accompanying losses. This is what is on my mind as I unwrap paintings from my January move and assess damages. I am moving them from my garage into a new backyard shed (it's a lovely shed). We hope to get our cars to fit in the garage as we are told that the salt in the Rhode Island ocean air will corrode them. Hopefully the shed will also keep the salt at bay (bad pun, not that I have to tell you).

I don't mean to ignore Summer #7 Green Field and Sky. I don't think of conservation when I look at it. It's a reassuring image. It says, "Forget what you're worrying about and focus on what is important." It is something to dwell on.

Summer #6 Sunrise & Summer #8 The Yellow House

Summer #6 Sunrise, 20" x 26", oil on canvas, 1998-2010

detail Summer #6 Sunrise

Summer #8 The Yellow House, 17" x 21", oil canvas, 2010

This week's post focuses on landscape painter Rackstraw Downes. He's very different from me but he's good. I became aware of his work in 1992. This month while watching my niece and nephews in Ridgefield, Connecticut, I was able to trade off with my husband to run to the Aldrich Museum of Art, conveniently located in the same town. An intimate exhibit of Downes' paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks in cases awaited. [Two other Rackstraw Downes' exhibits are concurrently on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York and at the Betty Cunningham Gallery in Chelsea.]

You must click on these links to see examples of his work to follow along.

The paintings are panoramic views of the underneath of the Westside Highway painted from direct observation in 2008-2009. Downes says he likes to be left alone to paint so if you see him, just keep walking. In a sketchbook, Downes writes that he gets annoyed with the changing weather. Light effects everything, after all. Downes isn't after an amplified, enveloping view like I do. He wants to see everything, to put it all into form. He wants to take it all in, process it, be present in it. In doing this he makes use of perspective: arcs and vectors structure the deep space, constructing the construction of the underpass. The horizon is stretched. I look to the left, straight, and right, seeing the other end in peripheral vision. There is a turn of the head in the gaze; the painting demands a slow scan (and then more of your attention). Bikers are painted as whole people, not shirts and pants painted separately. I couldn't care less about painting cars, but it matters to Downes and he makes me look. They aren't as dreamy as my visions, but they are still a dream as the picture is artifice. An angled stop sign becomes oval, striped like a buoy. Bike wheels function like the circles of barbed wire painted in another area. There is a glimpse of a building between trees, a poetic bit of painting; it's all poetry despite being concrete. In fact, he paints pictures of concrete.

Many painters ascribe to this kind of description, a factual world to ground us. What makes Rackstraw Downes more than amateurs who don't paint as well as they think they do? It has to do with the degree of perception, care, patience, skill in translating sight into paint, experience, and discipline.

I have some thoughts on what he does. Change of color temperature and light gives form and distinction to each piece. Orange, plastic construction fence is woven with the spaces in between its holes. The degree of thickness of paint is important - too thin, it would most likely be too dry, less personal, while too thick it would get clogged, loose a degree of legibility that is so much a part of his clear vision.

Treetops are made of small pieces like Vuillard but not as regular a pattern. They are fuller but sometimes fall flat, seemingly intentional. There is more space, more of a rustle, than in Vuillard. Again, as seen in Vuillard and positively delicious to painters, are shiny horizontal colored stripes with lines oily, like I like. There are also light, thin lines defining sections and what's between, simultaneously views and pieces of paint, many of which could be paintings on their own, if larger. I see the framing of spaces between sections of trees and leaves, made central in my hands, in my paintings.

As for the drawings, they are pinned to the walls, unframed. I've drifted away from frames and this is another professional example. Pieces of paper are taped together to make a longer drawing surface for the panoramas. Squiggly fibers in the paper remind one of the leaves in the paintings.

I couldn't stop looking; the pictures are full. My dots are here to fill you.