Fall #8 Clouds in the Middle

10x8

oil on canvas, PRIVATE COLLECTION

The photographer Alfred Stieglitz (husband of Georgia O'Keefe) is famous for promoting American Abstraction in his galleries 291 and An American Place and for his photographs of clouds, which he named Equivalents. Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs (also called Clouds in Ten Movements) walks the line of representation and abstraction. Photography, often used to document, was not yet used to explore abstraction in the same way the American painters did. Clouds were a subject both tangible for the camera and amorphous.

Painters don't just look at the total image of a painting but look at paint passages. In Stieglitz's photographs this meant the textures of the clouds and sky and the actual physical substance of print and paper, its particular qualities. Passages are like phrases in music or a line or two of a poem, non-verbal and fully of the particular language of the medium. They convey a lot of information about the approach and attitude of the artist in the work. To the painter-viewer, sometimes thrilling, juicier paint feels like candy, visual caffeine. Paint surfaces are only truly observable in seeing in real life, "in the flesh". Painters actually call the surface of a painting its "skin". It is sensual and holds the content of the work. Paintings that miss the mark for me are disappointingly dry, dead, lacking in sensitivity. It is easy to do this in political work in which the message sometimes overtakes the paint handling. The message is loud and is focused on something else. The art image may still be great but it is not of the kind of painting that makes me tick. An example is Barbara Kruger's work, which would be ineffective in the medium of paint. Diego Rivera painted enormous politically fueled murals but he had a painter's heart and managed to do both. Andy Warhol's genius is in his societal commentary/observation, graphic sensibility and snap. I love his work but if the museum was burning I'd probably run away with this Bonnard (Nude in the Bath and Small Dog). It's like saving family over a book you respect and with Warhol, production is such a theme that there are so many similar pieces in other places.

Fall #8 Clouds in the Middle is a relative of Stieglitz and Bonnard but is my own. Love that paint.