Twilight, White Light, Silver Woods

all 8" x 10" oil on panel

I just came across this Van Gogh, Painter on His Way to Work. I've never seen it before. There are so many paintings I haven't seen in person or in books that are viewable on-line. My professors in graduate school said there were only black and white photographs of paintings when they were students. It's so different now.

Of course I love the bracketing with the two trees in this one. They are like figures, the actual figure bisecting them. The lyricism is embedded in the color, space, and shape play. The vanishing point in the upper left marked by the point of the green field/triangle. The arch leading to its apex makes a shape echoed in the walking stick and the artist's leg and shadow, suggesting a gait or bounce in the step created by this visual rhythm.

The color in my new landscape paintings is subdued with Silver Woods crossing the divide into drawing. Twilight has a complementary blue/orange thing going on which contributes to the sense of tension between the trees. The curved black shape at the bottom seems to suggest looking out a car window. The neutral plane on the right edge has strokes connecting the black with the trees. The central light blue light is the calm amongst it all.

There is a fluidity in all of them that I like and a space I don't usually paint. I'm typically drawn to very open spaces but here the focus is finding open spaces within the woods. Leaves rustle, wind blows, shadows move. The planes of trees, space, and ground interact. The green leaves in White Light appear to extend toward the viewer, a tricky thing. I would like to do it again, to puzzle it out, to feel it again and reinvent it. I'll see what I can do.

From the Hydrangea

9" x 12", oil on panel

I took a break from the studio to go to the opening reception of "Scale: Experiencing Size, Surface, & Story" at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts. The show features the work of three artists, Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo, Jodi Colella, and Richard Kattman.

From the museum's press release:

"Barboza-Gubo (painting and sculpture), Colella (mixed media sculpture) and Kattman (painting) deliver visual expressions that truly absorb the viewer thanks to either their strategically planned size, detailed texture, significant message – or all of the above.

“In some cases the highly appropriate grand scale of this artwork engulfs the viewer – yet, we also have the chance to rise above work that is extremely exaggerated – but doesn’t tower over gallery-goers,” comments Mim Brooks Fawcett, Executive Director of the Attleboro Arts Museum.” “Scale controls our relationship with these authentic expressions and we are compelled to explore,” she added.

Click here for the full article.

Barboza-Gubo's work struck me in a way that doesn't happen very often. His self-portraits with antlers remind me of Joseph Beuys' watercolors also because of the limited color and alchemical properties as the former's are done in blood, gouache, and graphite. In the show is an impressive carved wood sculpture with twisting forms like a Van Gogh cypress tree with a narrative. Large-scale paintings of Barboza-Gubo's are also on view, forms reminding me of the violent chaos of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. Not in the show is his his Pieta Series 3 that blows me away. It has the mastery of Picasso's fragmented form and the layers of transparency and graphics combined with figuration as in Sigmar Polke. You can imagine that I'm jumping out of my skin even more to learn that he received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (my alma mater) and is a faculty member there.

"Scale: Experiencing Size, Surface, & Story" runs April 15 – May 7, 2011

On the home front, this is what I'm doing:

This painting comes out of the work I'm doing of Hydrangeas including an oil paintings, watercolors, and oil pastels. My oil painting, Blue Hydrangea, is focused on capturing the globes of petals while this new painting allows the globes to diffuse into layered colored points that go back and forth in space. They may be seen as part of the plant or as their own system. Painted in April during a series of cloudy days, I kept the edges of the circles soft. They are thinly glazed in contrast to the heavier applications in other paintings. I think they have a wet, earthy feel to them, the modulated brown ground reflects light like the dark backgrounds in old master paintings. Someone seeing the original asked if I use stencils. They are all freehand. Too much unnatural uniformity makes them too mechanical looking. I also draw the dots when using the iPad and don't use any of the tools that make automatic dots. I think there is an emotional tenderness that comes through in the hand no matter how perfect or imperfect the circles appear to be. Perfection isn't my goal. I'm involved in each moment. A dot is a moment but not an instant. I can't paint them in quick dabs. It's like patiently trying to catch rain drop by drop but not wanting the drops to combine. Maybe it's more like catching snowflakes on a mitten in order to look at each one.

Fall #7, October Sunrise

oil on panel

18x24

This is done the same day from the memory of looking out the window at approximately seven a.m. at the sunrise. A golden light came across the treetops, the grass was pale and cool, and the sky light pale blue-violet to violet. The color moment seemed so short compared to the rest of the day. I knew how I wanted to do it.

Dots are like the cherry on top of an ice cream sundae, of supreme importance, bright, celebratory, and excitement inducing. They are tempting but the rest of the picture also has something to offer.

In graduate school I painted a portrait of a fictional person. The painter Jake Berthot saw it and told me that I needed to paint the whole thing with the attention I paid to the woman's earring, a roundish piece of green. It was not to say that the whole painting needed to be made of that shape but that that piece of paint conveyed more in its delivery that the rest. Painters need to make sure that paint passages aren't just filled in areas like a coloring book but are functioning parts of the picture. This doesn't mean that all parts need to have the same thickness or level of description or saturation of color; it is a bit tricky. It is kind of like paying attention to someone else as an active listener and not zoning on parts of the conversation. I think I have learned how to do it and this painting is an example. Another example is this drawing of trees by Matisse. Even though it is made of simple lines, the negative spaces are considered. The space between the trees, for instance is hour glass shaped, echoing the curvy trees and complimenting their duality with the upper and lower parts of this shape, two for two.

If you look at this fabulous jpeg of Shoes by Van Gogh, 1888, you will see what I mean. Check out the floor. This reproduction is big enough to get into the paint passages. I can't get enough of it. You can see his thinking as he defines planes, observes variation in color, and physically describes the turns of the leather, it's facets made by the form of a shoe and the history of the individual wearer. It makes them a kind of portrait, intimate, through the appreciation of this everyday object and the life it represents. It is done with the care and tenderness one regards the clothing of loved ones who have passed and we have the sometimes difficult decision of keeping or donating them. People are passionate about Van Gogh because he understands this. He paints what he can't hold onto. The subject is shoes, the content is life.

The White House and House with Black Roof

oil on panel

36" x 24"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

ceramic relief

6" x 4 1/2"

The ceramic relief was done after the painting. Circles are made by pressing the end of a tool into the clay; some look convex but they are all concave. They define planes but also float.

There are trails leading your eye around, dictating a specific speed, tempo, like most painters do. The book Cezanne's Composition maps the directions Cezanne takes the viewer, like arrows painted on the floor for learning dance steps. Cezanne is often somber, intense and a lower key than Van Gogh. The Plain White T's have a song I like similar to this mood, Write You a Song. "I will write you a song; that's how you know our love is still strong." I've said it before - I'm a romantic.

In my mind my painting and relief aren't just depictions of houses but are about making a home with someone. Crosby Stills and Nash's Our House and Billy Joel's You're My Home does it for me as does the new kids movie Up. The part of the story that takes Up beyond the pat endings of many animations is the relationship of the elderly man and his wife. He has a loyalty to his house because of his memories of her together with him in it. He has a very hard time letting go, to say the least. A house is a house. A home is the love inside. Pass the tissues.

For Christoph who wrote "I love Nicole" in sharpie on my arm.