Blackberries

33" x 24", oil on canvas

It's been a while since I've painted hands. Previous examples include:

Firefighter 9/11 No.2, 36" x 32", oil on canvas, 2002

and For You, It's Love, 20" x 16", oil on panel, 2008

The earlier paintings have expressionistic, loose paint handling. Blackberries retains some of that in the bottom left corner and especially in the wrist. The energetic blue paint seems set free.

picture plane

Artists need other artists. When I first went to Massachusetts College of Art and Design for undergraduate studies, I was intoxicated with excitement to meet other people who thought like me. Wait, that's not quite right. Artists are defiantly individualistic in their thinking, but there is a commonality in thinking differently from the status quo. "Art School" is a funny thing, even more so, a MFA program. Art is a bit elusive, go ahead, try to define it. I double majored painting and art education, seeing both sides, the doing and the teaching. Visual language can be taught, mechanics. I suppose it is like teaching someone to be a writer. Most of the language of painting, the ABC's and grammar, is taught in undergrad. Using grammar or rebelling against grammar in order to best serve the expression is what happens in a masters program. The process is about articulation, developing ideas, learning about what's out there and finding one's own vision. A MFA program sets an artist out on this life-long process. How to begin, how to continue, how to see direction in one's own work from the work itself. It is so unlike most fields where factual knowledge needs to be consumed in large quantities and tests are administered to make sure it is absorbed. I remember someone almost mocking my degree because it culminated in a thesis exhibition rather than a paper.

In the visual arts, graduate school gives access to other artists as peers in addition to artist-mentors/critics/professors. The latter are generally older, often quite older, and definitely more experienced. They're like Yoda. I'm not kidding - Yoda, Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall. [nerdy Star Wars and Harry Potter reference] In addition to materials and techniques (potions class), there's a feeling that how to use "The Force" is being taught. Now some artists are very concrete and don't believe spirituality, philosophy or anything mysterious at all is involved in their work. Georgia O'Keefe insists she only paints flowers (not sexuality) but Magritte says the painting of a pipe is not a pipe, so he knows there are other layers. The thing is artists are involved in attempting to give form to their experience of the world. Experiencing the world is mysterious. It's pretty strange (I overheard two artists remarking on how weird sleep is). Artists think about what it's like to be in the world and they do it rather uniquely. Each has his/her own points of interest. Maybe they notice more than other people; they think more during the rote tasks. There are probably a lot of people who aren't anesthetized and are observant but don't make art about it. Art education theorist John Dewey asserted that experience is the touchstone for art-making and that anyone can be an artist.

My intoxication with an art community was even more fervent in entering Penn. When touring the MFA program I saw a final critique of a graduation painter, Brian Kreydatus. His work reminded me of Marsden Hartley and Lucien Freud, high quality. Even then he showed he is one of these people who see more in daily life. I am still totally nuts about his work, especially his Self Portrait on 41st Birthday. You must, must click on the link to see this painting depicting himself shaving. The shaving cream is almost like a mask, as if he is trying on a white beard, imagining aging before the mirror; the birthday title marks years. It is a moment in time during a typically morning ritual; the shaving cream isn't going to stay but will be gradually removed to reveal something else. The brushstrokes mark locations describing both the form and light that won't always be there. It reminds me a bit, not by what it looks like but by what it means, of Bonnard's famous self-portraits, many also done in a bathroom. The MOMA's description is fascinating, much of which could equally be said of Self Portrait on 41st Birthday.

My hand paintings have some of this searching, temporal vulnerability. Blackberries is more of a statement, a proclamation. It shows the viewer the fruit, individual clusters, small things worth looking at in the human hand that found them.

Winter Landscapes #15 (Smooth in Blue and White) and #17 (Hazy Sky and Snow)

12" x 12" oil on panel

Now that it's officially spring I have to get caught up on posting my winter paintings; these are the last this year.

Smooth in Blue and White reminds me a bit of Georgia O'Keefe and the paintings she did of adobe buildings in New Mexico with their soft, flowing, yet rectilinear forms. She is an example of an artist who painted both abstractly and representationally , like myself. She said, "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." Those "things" are why painters paint rather than choose a different medium. Arthur Dove, a contemporary (and another fave of mine) painted similar forms.

Hazy Sky and Snow has a sun smack in the middle and towards the top of my composition. The sky and land bisect the square. Light colors shimmer like winter light. The arrangement reminds me of the painter Adolph Gottlieb, famous for his abstract paintings often having the particular structure of a vertical format with a circle painted at the top half and a jagged shape on the bottom. The two forms set in opposition stimulate metaphors in the viewer. I especially love his Rolling, 1961, with its landscape format, nice and bold calligraphic black line at the bottom, and two large circles in colors I love together: red and blue. He makes use of the color of the canvas like Chinese landscape painters use the white of the paper, something I enjoy as well.

My spring series will continue shortly...

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.