Self-Portrait October 2009

12" x 9"

oil on panel

Hi. It is time for a new self-portrait. I don't have a time-frame in mind for how often to make them, but time is marching on so Carpe Diem.

My face is not fractured as in previous paintings. Fracture/facture. The facture of a self-portrait is often more noticeable in ones that are fractured, when pieces of paint are laid to denote the framework of a head, related to the planes of Cubism. Cezanne, who came before Cubism, studied such planes in space but was also sensitive to color as form rather than decoration, frosting on a cake. [I love making sentences with "Cubism" and "cake frosting" in them.] In Self-Portrait with Rose Background [c. 1875 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 66 x 55 cm (26 x 21 5/8")], he defines the facets of his head with pieces of paint and even turns one such stroke into his delicate lower eyelid, the pedestal for his piercing gaze. He is as intense as the red-rose background. It swirls, breaks into his form, defining his ear, the space between his beard and moustache, his lips, and even cuts into his neck threatening decapitation like Nearly Headless Nick from Harry Potter. He plays a similar game with the background and figure interacting in his Self-Portrait 1878-80 [(160 Kb); Oil on canvas, 60.3 x 46.9 cm (23 3/4 x 18 1/2 in); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.] He is supposed to have been a quiet person and I've noticed his mouth is often obscured in his self-portraits while his eyes are very alert. His voice is his vision. The mouth in this gets lost in his beard of yellow ochre and greens with black marks, exactly like the background. His hairline continues in the sharp line of his collar, accentuating his vertical, solid presence. The word for his stare that keeps coming to me is "shrewd". Even a used car salesman would back down.

Now back to me. I don't want it to be all about me, but it is self-portraits we are talking about and they are reflexive in nature. I'm not looking shrewd. I can't say no to Girl Scouts selling cookies, but I am old enough to see a scam despite the clarity of my face. Landscape colors are the background with dots like my current paintings. They visually interplay with the blue circles of my collar and eye; this is what I see. A patch of purple background is the springboard for the purple turn of the collar; its blue is the mixture of the landscape yellow and green, completing the land with sky, blue hollow circles make for white cloud centers. The curl of my hair and its red highlights (not natural : ) suggest playfulness, very different than Cezanne's brewing. You can check out my blog of archives for my own brewing Self-Portrait With Gloved Hand from 1999. Both Cezanne paintings and the Degas Self-Portrait in the Getty Museum that I haven't forgotten (I saw it more than ten years ago) are in three quarter view, as is mine. Answers.com defines three-quarter view as, "A view of an object which is midway between a front and a side view." We don't disclose all but you get a good look. Speaking of museums, art museum lovers will get a laugh from this article in The Onion. Take time to play.

Spring #4 (View of Central Park from the 21st Floor)

oil on canvas

36" x 42"

The artists Sigmar Polke and Roy Lichtenstein used Benday dots in their paintings as employed by printers (Lichtenstein modeled his work specifically after comics). I'm not so interested in the regularity of that method as I like the quirkiness of my hand as well as the option to change scale. The location of the dots is important to the space in the work. Think Cezanne, Giacometti, and Mondrian mapping space. Their playfulness as compared to a mechanized look make them more Polka than Benday and also differ from the seriousness of the aforementioned artists. I also do not want to limit myself to very saturated colors (spaced differently to appear like more of a range) as is often the case with the Benday dots, preferring to mix more, which works better with the larger dots. Mondrian, while not a dot painter, reduced his palette to the primaries. He found the problem of working with red, yellow, blue, as well as black and white very complex, changing the size and placement of rectangles and squares in order to create a vision resulting from this interplay.

In Spring #4 dots expand on a white ground, showing the bursting energy of the city and the green treetops of Central Park.

The Neighbor's Shed

36" x 24"

oil on panel

Okay, you might notice this is a fall painting when we are in winter. I did an oil pastel of the view out one of my studio windows and this is a painting done from the drawing. I think the dots are kind of perky, not in a bubblegum snapping teenager way, but in a playful way. Rather than crunching leaves, one feels as if it is possible to bounce on the treetops like with moonboots. This playfulness is a quality that keeps the work, harkening back to Pointillism, from being dry and redundant. A fellow student in art school complained on our trips to the museum that it was "like going to a cemetery. It is full of dead art by dead artists." Perhaps some artists might agree, maybe those trying to find the cutting edge. For me the art is timeless while of its time, as full of life as Mozart is today.
The neighbors put up a new shed and it creeped into my work. The Post-Impressionists found Impressionism limiting because the short marks didn't lend themselves to clearly defining form. It was almost a focusing problem. Cezanne delineated form, but I think his bathers walked the line. I didn't want to make the thin trees out of dots and used line with dots weaving in and out of them. I see so many variations in the color of what I am looking at that I am not always content to make one or two stand for all, thus this pixelization. This painting makes me think of Pissarro, especially one at the Guggenheim, The Hermitage at Pontoise, where I studied how he handled paint. His work strikes me as quieter than a lot of the other Impressionists, a little less bang, but the paintings are very thoughtful, carefully and beautifully seen and made. If you check out this painting: Landscape at Chaponval, you can see what I admire about his treatment of houses in a landscape. I like the way they are nestled there, part of the patterning of the picture with the greenery coming in front of, behind, and through. Imagine what would have happened if he had heard rock 'n' roll?!