Spring Favorite

Wolfgang Laib, Pollen from Hazelnut, at NYC's MoMA.

I took this picture on my iPhone a couple months ago at NY's Museum of Modern Art. An 18x21-foot installation in the building's main atrium, the shape appeared to radiate, a dense field of low vaporous light. Visitors from January through March walked around this gorgeous, luminous square on the floor - it was like being inside a Rothko painting. At first I thought it actually was light projected from above. Then I realized it was some kind of powder ... a video on the wall explained it was POLLEN, from plants.

Of course - what else could pulse with that kind of vibrant color but the stuff of life itself?

Wolfgang Laib spends quiet months among the fields around his home in southern Germany gently tapping the sides of tree branches in spring and summer, collecting the pollen that sifts down for installations like this. In tune with the natural sequence of the seasons, he harvests the pollen on each tree or flower when it's in bloom, beginning with hazelnut, moving on to dandelion and other flowers, and finally ending with pine.  

Later he will spoon the materials onto a flat surface in the form of a public work of art, the size of which is determined by the season's yield of pollen. They envelope the viewers who walk around them, often in a sort of jubilant trance. To Laib the artwork is the pollen itself, but the entire process is clearly a form of spiritual mediation.

The work has a strange simplicity (a single color and the square being such a basic geometrical figure). Laib's humble and devotional orientation to his time-consuming process and its inherent natural symbolism trumps the shock value of installations I've seen weighed down by more aggressive agendas and theoretical trappings.

There's a personal connection for the artist of course, and as he explains, it has to do with being surrounded by a great deal of death during his early years as a medical student. This work, then, is an earnest embrace and celebration of the energy of life - a fitting tribute to spring.

You can watch the short wall video and get more information about Laib on MoMA's exhibit website.

Notes on Charles H. Woodbury

Charles H. Woodbury, Breaking Wave

I've been delving into the work and theories of Charles H. Woodbury (1864-1940), and the more I look the more excited I'm getting about the treasure trove of inspiration in his method and his words.

The historical background is fascinating in itself; he founded an art colony in Ogunquit, Maine and in 1896 established an influential summer school there devoted to what today we'd call perceptual painting. But I'm also seeing how his ideas can be relevant to artists alive and working today. 

Woodbury wrote some startling things: "Paint as though you were sent for" - "Paint big and fast outside" - "Get the big color relations" - "Paint in verbs not in nouns." 

That's a call to fresh seeing and exuberant creativity!

Painting is perceptual - it's always more and always less than a record of the visible. Painting - and any art, really - can also be a mechanism for seeing more and better, a powerful tool for rediscovering the self, for recognizing not only what we hold dear but what and how we truly think and see, for enquiry into the very nature of our relationship to reality. "You don't draw what you see of the wave - you draw what it does!" he would tell his students. His immediacy as a painter springs from active seeing - "seeing big" - and getting excited about capturing the flavor of life lived in the moment fully awake and engaged.

I'm in the process of putting together a series of blog posts and a short presentation on Woodbury's life and art which will be part of an Ogunquit workshop I'm offering on April 19. My focus will be on how to apply his message about open-hearted seeing and expression to almost any creative work - painting, yes, but why not photography, writing, poetry, making sushi? I believe we all already possess the tools to make art - what we need is the inspiration to do so, and Woodbury's art and writings can provide illuminating insights that can help add more energy, vitality, and depth to our creative processes. 

Is Woodbury's seascape above a "great" painting, in the art-historical sense? By some standards maybe, by others maybe not. But it stands as a certain testament to open-eyed seeing and direct expression, a palpable reminder that freshness, vitality, and inspiration (worthy goals!) are only a heartbeat away if we want them - it's a call to authentic seeing and being.

Cezanne's Magnificent Bathers, Part 1

Cezanne, The Bathers (1898-1906)

During the last 20 years of his his solitary life, isolated and immersed in his work, Paul Cezanne reinvented painting as a crucible in which to experiment with new combinations of sensation and representation.

In his many paintings of "bathers" - mostly nude women and men lounging beside alluvial scenery -  Cezanne achieves a mature synthesis of psychology, private symbolism, tradition, spontaneity, and joyous color and light. A masterpiece of early modernism, The Bathers, also known as "The Large Bathers" because of its size, from 1906. is currently in Boston, on loan from Philadelphia and on display at the MFA. The museum is pairing this painting, on which Cezanne worked during the last six years of his life, with another large-scale important work of post-Impressionism, Gaugin's epic Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 

Gaugin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1891)

It's hard not to see each of the paintings as culminations of these great artists' careers: last testaments to the world on a monumental scale. To see them both on one wall is a once-in-a-lifetime treat (and then, of course, turn your head and to the left and you're viewing gorgeous Monets, to the right it's masterworks by Van Gogh - not bad!). 

Cezanne saw Impressionism as liberating but too superficial. He had emerged from the introspective personal mythology of his early work ready to embrace Impressionism's light and color, but he wanted to make out of it something more solid, more "permanent," he said. 

Melding the movement's freedom from the Academic rules of painting with the firm construction and solidity of the more enduring art "of the museums" committed him to objects and vision. The irony is, that despite believing he was an ultra-honest realist in the service of Truth, the work he created, with its deliberately interpenetrating surfaces, objects, spaces, and paint, set the stage for abstraction and modern art; as blogger John Haber has succinctly observed, without Cezanne, "the art of the next century (the 20th) becomes incomprehensible."

To see what he means, one has only to turn to Picasso's Les Damoiselles D'Avignon, painted in 1907. 

Picasso, Les Damoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

This painting changed art forever. It was here, trading in nymphs for prostitutes, Renaissance perspective for shattered space, the Greek ideal for a jarring, brutal quasi-primitivism, that Picasso outstripped the last remaining vestiges of traditional European representation and reinvented art's role as a daring reflection of our uncertain times. Inadvertently setting the stage for Cubism and all that it would mean to modern art, Picasso's work was conceived as an acerbic response to Matisse's La Joie [bonheur] de Vivre, completed in 1906 (note the two female figures with identical poses, arms folded behind their heads). 

Matisse, La Bonheur de Vivre, 1905-06

The idealized utopianism of Matisse's conception ("natural" men and women depicted with a childlike exuberance freely loving, dancing, and existing in a beautiful, bright simplicity) was in turn a direct answer to the Bathers of Cezanne.

And that's all we have time for today..... the art-historical-high-fallutin' artspeak of this post has worn me out already, so a fuller treatment of Cezanne's masterpiece will have to wait until next time.

Sargent Watercolor Show Coming

The Boston MFA and Brooklyn Museum are mounting a major exhibition of John Singer Sargent's exquisite watercolors this year.

Santa Maria della Salute, by John Singer Sargent, 1904, translucent and opaque watercolor with graphite underdrawing

The opportunity to see in person nearly 100 of Sargent's watercolors is fantastic news for east-coast painters and art lovers.  In these plein-air paintings, Sargent seems to have emerged from the shadowy pressure cooker of the portrait studio to respond freshly and spontaneously to the glorious play of light, form, color, and atmosphere that he saw and felt in the visible world.

Together, the 93 watercolors in the exhibition, most of which have not been on view for decades, provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to view a broad range of Sargent’s finest production, which must be among the finest of any artist's in the medium.

The landmark exhibition John Singer Sargent Watercolors unites for the first time the holdings of Sargent's watercolors acquired by the two institutions in the early 20th century. 

The exhibition will also present nine oil paintings, including Brooklyn’s “An Out-of-Doors Study, Paul Helleu and His Wife” (1889), and Boston’s “The Master and His Pupils” (1914). The exhibition will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from April 5 to July 28, 2013, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 13, 2013- January 20, 2014. It will then travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

I have raved about Sargent's watercolors in this space already, and I've discussed his marvelous sense of abstract design and his lovely and immortal oil, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose here as well. Some would class certain of Sargent's watercolors among the finest small paintings ever made. This show promises to bring the proper attention to what art historians have for too long considered a tangential aspect of Sargent's work.

Sargent's oil, The Master and His Pupils (1904) at the MFA

The Brooklyn Museum and MFA Publications are co-publishing a fully illustrated book to accompany the exhibition. Co-authored by the collaborative exhibition team, the volume includes a lead essay by the MFA's Erica E. Hirshler; a collaborative essay by the lead project conservators, Antoinette Owen and Annette Manick; and chapters that expand upon the exhibition’s thematic framework. 

For more information, visit www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/sargent_watercolors/ or www.mfa.org/exhibitions/john-singer-sargent-watercolors.

Paintings About to Dissolve in Light

Peter Doig, Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like) 1996

Recently, by chance it seems, I've stumbled over several paintings in various states of being overwhelmed by diffused, reflected, and in the case of the Peter Doig above, cascading light.

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter's porchscape above is a fine study in light-filled "transparent shadows." Oil painters use transparent shadows as opposed to just dark or colored blobs of paint so create the sense of visible, textured surfaces modulated with a combination of shadow and reflected or ambient light.

It's so believable we don't give the reality of anything else in the painting a second thought, but look how much the pines are softening in the glow, and how about that chair on the right - it appears to be dissolving completely!

Israel Hershberg

Painted shadows become more convincing when filled with light that's bouncing into them.  Israel Hershberg's cityscape above serves as an illustration, and the whole thing is a delightful study in how light melts matter. Here the light is direct, ambient, reflected, diffused, and atmospheric all at once! Hershberg had been experimenting with very distant landscapes, as seen through a telescope. What he's really interested in isn't the city but the light-diffusing atmosphere itself.

Monet's cathedrals are unbelievable in person.

Like poetry that (according to someone somewhere I'm sure!?) gains in purity as it approaches the condition of silence, such paintings seem like objects nearing a sort of sublimation, a trans-substantial, self-luminous state. Monet's cathedral paintings come to mind.

At their most extreme they're like diaphanous veils shimmering between nothingness and being, wavering at the uncertain boundary of matter and light: physical and spiritual, real and imaginary at once.

Monet again. Show me the Monet!

In this below one by contemporary Dutch plein-air artist Roos Schuring, the diffused light from the winter sky and the snow create a nice balance between ambiance and substance, don't you think?

Here's an Aldro Hibbard in the same category.

Aldro Hibbard, February Orchard

And here to take us out are three diffused-light-filled landscapes by contemporary Russian plain-air painter Bato Dugharzhapov.

Dawn, Bato Dugharzhapov

Bato Dugharzhapov

Winter Dawn by Bato Dugharzhapov

It's the way the light values threaten to overwhelm even the midtones in these that I love, I think. The loose paint seems almost a metaphor for matter dissolving in light.

J.M.W. Turner, Sun Setting Over a Lake, 1840

Turner's another painter whose subjects are often being overtaken by luminescence. I imagine the air in the painting above to be saturated with moisture suffused with sunlight.

I'm sure some of you can think of others that I should add to this collection?

Lee Mullican, Space, 1951

Richard Serra on Becoming an Artist

"When you become interested in the investigation of process, you aren’t concerned with the psychology of what you’re doing nor what it’s going to look like when it’s done. It gives you a way of proceeding in relation to the material, the body, and making, that divorces you from any notion of metaphor, any notion of easy imagery.

Watch the segment on Richard Serra from Art21's "Space"

What artists do is they invent strategies that allow themselves to see in a way they haven’t seen before, to extend their vision. Various artists do it in different ways: Cezanne did it in his way, Pollock did it in his way… 

What’s interesting about artists is they constantly come up with ways of informing themselves by inventing tools or techniques or processes that allow them to see into a material manifestation in the way that you would not if you dealt with standardized or academic ways of thinking…. 

One constantly tries to invent ways of seeing into what one is doing so you don’t get into some lockstep notion of how to do what you do. I have to invent new strategies in order not to go back to something that’s just a reflex motion."

- Richard Serra

The Serra quote above is transcribed from "Richard Serra: Tools and Strategies," a short video spot in which Serra explains his way of working as an artist and the specific methods involved in creating his art. Click the caption beneath the screen shot below to view the clip on Art21's "exclusives" page.

Richard Serra Spills the Beans

Why Does It Work?

Wild Surf at Ogunquit by Edward Henry Potthast

Here's a painting of the crashing surf and rocks in the small coastal town of Ogunquit, Maine. It's by Edward Henry Potthast, an American Impressionist whose popularity peaked around the turn of the 20th century. To my eye, this painting is strong and exciting. Now, there are plenty of paintings of crashing surf and rocks in the world, but this one happens to work.

Why?

Perhaps it's that the loose, juicy paint handling is particularly well suited to the subject of wild waves rushing between jagged rocks.

Maybe it's the design - the sweeping horseshoe of the shoreline rocks spiraling around the agitated waves. There's a wild counterpoint between the brushstrokes that follow the planes of the rocks and those that define the breaking waves.

Is it the color? I keep coming back to those fluffy blobs of white paint in the foam, the ambiguous dabs of muted cobalt in the rocks, the rich tones of blue and green in the waves.

My suspicion is that every painting either "works" to a sufficient degree or doesn't because of the relation of all of its parts to themselves and to the picture's central idea. I also suspect this notion is just as weak as any other that aspires to uncover "the key" to beauty in art and why a work moves us. We know this much, that great art cannot be reduced to any absolute formula. 

Still, I think questioning what moves us about a work of art deepens our appreciation and serves us as we look at other paintings or attempt our own. 

Why do you think the Potthast works?

By the way, in April I'm leading a one-day workshop in Ogunquit, where Potthast painted (as did Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Emil Carlson, and many others). There's info about it on my Website if you'd like to try to unlock Potthast's secret by trying it yourself.