Don't Beg, Just Borrow and Steal

Christopher Volpe, Illumination, 24" x 36" 2016 (?)

“What does it mean,” says Picasso, “for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What’s wrong with that? On the contrary, it’s a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can’t! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch…. And it’s at the very moment you make a botch of it that you’re yourself.”

No artist works in a vacuum. Thank the gods! Everything we paint is conditioned - no nourished - by everything we’ve done, thought, felt, and SEEN, including the art of the past, and rightly so. I think what Picasso’s getting at is that the goal, whether we’re talking about realism, abstraction, copying, or improvising, is to get to that place creatively where you cannot help but to produce art that is yours (or at least partly! :) because it isn't a copy. If you learn by copying others, great! Keep going and inevitably your art will look nothing like the reference because it will come from you. Try as you might to be consistent, if it's coming from the right place the artwork you make will surprise you. That's how you know you're on the right track. KEEP GOING.

To even make that possible, they say, you have to first learn technique, so that in the heat of creating you can forget about it and just GO. However, I suspect that an especially strong vision will find (or invent) its own technique. Trust your must and you'll pick up enough to get the job done. As Hawthorne said, “when you hear people say they can see a thing but not do it, they cannot really see it. If they did, they could do it even if they put the paint on with their fingers.”

Edward Seago, Thurle Marshes

Here is a landscape by Edward Seago, a 20^th century English plein air oil and watercolor painter who died in 1974. I used this as a starting point for my cloud painting above, which I’ve titled Illumination. I spent 90 percent of the painting time not looking at it and looking instead at what was happening on my canvas and allowing that to inspire me. I painted most of the foreground the following day, without looking at Seago’s landscape at all. Nonetheless, I think you can see that my work owes much to the Englishman. However, paradoxically the two paintings look nothing alike, because they don't feel the same.

I have no problem helping myself, as Picasso also said, to anything I find useful or compelling in others’ paintings. Seago himself was strongly influenced by, among other precedents, the Dutch landscapists of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries.

Below you see another Seago, one of my favorites. I love how loosely he paints everything yet how true he is to the nuances of tone, color, and temperature. The brushstrokes (or “marks”) in his paintings often form an abstract pattern on their own that contributes harmoniously to the overall mood and impression of the work. In the painting above, the strongly horizontal-diagonal sweep of the clouds is complimented by the equally strong yet opposing directionals (in this case vertical-diagonal lines) that comprise the foreground grasses on either side of the muddy road. Seago isn’t just “moving the eye through the painting” in an agreeable way; instead, he’s using big, gestural, directional brushwork to create expressive abstract geometries that contribute to the work’s affective quality (aka “meaning”) and raise it above mere imitation of nature.

The brushstrokes and mark-making (most clearly visible at the edges of things) form their own self-contained abstract pattern that contributes to the vibrant sense of breeziness, air, and kaleidoscopic light and shadow that’s at the heart of the artist's experience and so, at the heart of the successful work.

Edward Seago

But let's be clear. Seago owes his palette and his compositions to earlier Dutch masters. Below is a painting by Jacob Maris that contains many of the same elements that Seago’s painting does only in a different configuration: common to both paintings is the (typically Dutch) division into a small strip of land and a big sky, bright, blowsy clouds composed of patches of warm pigment beside warm blues offset by cool mauves and grays, neutralized green-grays and violets for the foreground and middle-ground land, as well as the overall sense of scale.

My point is that he took what he needed to express his authentic experience and his ideas about nature and what it feels like to be a living being, present to one's most clearly felt experiences in the world. It's not that Seago "stole" from Jacob Maris. Of course he did, as all good artists do from their masters. After all, Maris himself was one of scores of painters who worked off paintings made 200 years earlier by Dutch masters such as van Ruisdael. Here in the earlier Ruisdaels we see the same sense of scale, same sky-to-earth ratio, and a similar use of understated chiaroscuro, earth colors, and diffused light.

Two by Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-1682)

It’s best to avoid getting hung up on questions of influence vs. plagiarizing or derivation. After all the technique and practice that is or isn’t brought to bear on the matter, it’s how much authenticity and invention, how much compelling interest, joy, and imagination, how much of yourself that you get into the work that counts. Be honest with yourself and you’ll sense the truth. This is what I am going to take away from this little exercise, anyway.

Someone asked if I take lots of photographs of clouds – I do. But I almost never use them as reference photos. I woke up today and the pale blue sky was beribboned with violet cloud shadows carrying warm glowing orange-pink puffs, much like the skies in the landscapes we’ve been looking at here. Note to self: I did snap a photo or two, but far more important to capturing future imaginary clouds on my canvases is to notice myself noticing and being thrilled by the colors and the rhythmic sweep of the clouds across the sky – so as to create an embedded memory-feeling to draw upon when representing clouds – by pulling paint across the canvas with the same rhythmic sweep.

“Copiers don’t bother me,” Picasso declared, “If they have any temperament, it’ll appear eventually to disclose the personality of an artist… It is better to copy a drawing or painting than to try to be inspired by it, to make something similar. In that case, one risks painting only the faults of his model. A painter’s atelier should be a laboratory. One doesn’t do a monkey’s job here: one invents. Painting is a jeu d’esprit.”

Tree Hugger

This compelling painting is part of a show in Boston this summer (2026) at HallSpace in Dorchester called "What Do Trees Know?" The write-up pasted here featured in the excellent Boston online arts mag, The Arts Fuse:

Joel Janowitz is a Boston-area painter who work can be found in numerous public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard Museums, and the Yale University Art Gallery.  A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, he has twice received artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Janowitz has taught at Wellesley College (2003-2010), Massachusetts College of Art/Fine Arts Work Center’s Low-Residency MFA program (2006-2010), and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1994-2000). 

His "Protected Trees" series dates to the re-laying of underground infrastructure in his home city of Cambridge, Mass during 2015 and 2016.

And Then You Do: A Poem by Tom Clark

Bartholomeo Bettera (1639 - 1699) (Italian), Still Life with Musical Instruments and Books

Poem

Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings

Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined

Never to occur
You don’t mind

You feel spiritual and alert

As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like

You’ll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do

- Tom Clark

Painting is a Revelation of Being

Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Canal, 1890, 19" x 25"

“Painting isn’t about beauty.  Beauty is about consciousness.  Beauty is a gateway, an adornment and invitation to space.  The space within the painting.  And space is consciousness.  Space is being.  When we paint we are exploring being.  That is why we need the three dimensional illusion – it isn’t an illusion, it is a gateway – to being...  

.... We are experimenting with different ways of being.  See Rembrandt.  Cezanne.  Monet.  Morandi.  Matisse.  Titian.  Piero.  Chardin.  Soutine.  Martin.  De Kooning.  Diebenkorn.  Auerbach.  Kossoff.  Giacometti.  Resnick.  This is what painting has to offer.  It isn’t the object, for God’s sake.  It is being."

 -Jordon Wolfson
How Painting Can Save the World, Actually

Rembrandt, The Mill

Wolfson's words above, taken from his essay How Painting Can Save the World, Actually seem to me a helpful answer to the questions that haunt every artist, chief among them, what is art and what is it for? What's the real purpose and value of this thing we do called painting, especially in THIS world, as it is NOW.

Cezanne, Bathers

Even if you think all you're doing is painting what your eyes are seeing, your work is still an answer to that question, whether you're conscious of it or not. It matters because the paintings you make will define your stance on the purpose of art whether you like it or not.

Monet's Waterlilies at Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris

This has nothing to do with style. As Wolfson writes in How Painting Can Save the World, Actually, it's not even what painting is but what beauty can do for us that's at the heart of the matter. 

Morandi, Still Life, 1956

It isn't about what a given painting does or doesn't look like. It doesn't matter how detailed, how loose, tight, realistic or abstract. It's how we experience it - what we experience when we're willing to enter into it as open, attentive viewers - that counts. So painting ends up being about connecting with someone who shares their own connection with the world. Beauty is about Being.  

Matisse, Open Window at Colliure, 1905

I like how he equates the space within a painting with consciousness, which he sees as also a kind of mental space: "Space is consciousness. Space is being." This to me implies that very flat paintings (Warhol's for example) in effect shut down the viewer's ability to mentally inhabit them and experience them as a corollary of human consciousness (surely one of Warhol's intentions). It's very easy to forget spatial dimensionality when painting abstractly, and this is one reason many abstract paintings don't emote very much to speak of.

Titian, David and Goliath, 1580

If "beauty is about consciousness," painted beauty is an "invitation" to a mentally inhabitable space in which the mind encounters a metaphor for the otherwise occult network of relations between itself and the world.

Pippa Hale-Lynch, Grief: Self-Portrait with Jam, 2024, oil 

Painting invites us to a revelation of being.

Chardin, The Ray, 1728

Soutine, Still Life with Ray Fish, 1924

Hyman Bloom, The Bride, 1942

What follows are some additional excerpts from this provocative essay.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963

"Painting does have a necessary and ancient function; it isn’t to depict the world—it is to weave the world; or rather, it is to reveal and make visible the actual weave of the world, the weave that already exists.  What does this mean?  When we paint we have the possibility of bringing our selves into the work—bringing our life force into the mark, the material, bringing our actual being, in this very moment, as it is, into our touch and setting free that vibration and energy.  To do this is not easy, although it is simple." 

de Kooning, Long Island landscape, c. 1980s

"But it means daring to bring our actual selves, as we are, without judgment, into the work. It is also a risk and challenge to receive work, to open ourselves up to painting as a force from another person, another life, to feel safe enough to receive that force and allow it in.  This also is not easy, although this too is simple.  And we find that when we do open to the given surface that there may be a sense of aesthetic force, perhaps beauty, perhaps sheer presence, a kind of transmission from one person to another through the material."

Rothko

"I want to express my feelings, not illustrate them." - Jackson Pollock

"When we paint we are not simply making images, we are weaving our subjectivities, and we are doing this through the medium of colored mud on a flat surface—dumb material participating in the exchange and heightening of awareness.  Painting is not simply an activity of self expression—it is an activity of interbeing, of our intersubjectivity, of our actual interconnectedness.  Painting reveals this, gives proof to it in its very nature.  We are not who we think we are."  

Diebenkorn, from the Ocean Park series, 1976

"Painting carries the possibility of getting us out of our minds and into an awareness of our being.  That is what occurs when we receive a painting, whether from another’s hands or from our own.  The reality of our experience facing great painting, the power and force of transmission remains a mystery as long as we remain in the story of Separation."

Marilyn Minter, Mudbath, 2006, Enamel on Metal, 84 x 120 inches

"As we dare to allow our minds to enter into the story of Interbeing, painting affirms the larger truth of this new story.  Its essential nature re-storys the world, reimagining who we are and where we are going.  As we paint we have the possibility to not only make an object to look at, but to retell our story."

Aurbach, Head of Gerda Boehme

"Painting is currently trapped within the category of fine art.  But what if painting isn’t about a picture, isn’t even about an object.  What if painting, actually, is about the interaction between two minds, two hearts, two beings—the painter and the viewer?  What if painting is about a way of coming to the world, a kind of communion?"  

Leon Kossoff, Head of Mother, 1965

"John Dewey writes in Art as Experience, 'In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience.  Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding.'"

Giacometti, Portrait of Anne, 1954

"In other words, there is no work of art outside of our experience; that is where the reality of art is located.  It is an interaction that reveals an inherent interconnectedness, an interbeing that reveals the illusion of separation. If that were our cultural story of painting what would that look like?  What would an exhibition look like?  Would that change the way we paint?  What happens to the fetish of the object?  The possibility of an interlacing communion through the lending of colored earth to human sensation: mud and oil embodying human consciousness."

Milton Resnick, Untitled, 1990

Milton Resnick

Ross Bleckner, Architecture of the Sky, c. 1980

What if painting’s function isn’t to depict the world but to make visible the interlace of reality and experience? What if the material conditions of painting conduct, through touch and vision, Being's very "vibration and energy?" To say it as Romantically as possible: What if mark, color, and rhythm aren’t “formal elements” but expressions of the life force itself?

Vermeer's Geographer (an Enigma)

Vermeer, The Geographer, 1662

The Mapmaker

Vermeer's geographer goes on looking 

out of the window at a world that he

alone sees while in the room around him

the light has not moved as the centuries

have revolved in silence behind their clouds

beyond the leaves the seasons the numbers

he has not seen them out of that window

the world he sees is there as we see him

looking out at the light there in the window

-W.S. Merwin, from Garden Time, Copper Canyon Press (2016)

On Presence: Notes on Painters' Painters

Warning: Wayward philosophical-aesthetic ramblings ahead!

When I've pondered the meaning of the phrase "a painter's painter" before, I've pretty much decided that it describes an artist whose work appeals strongly to other painters, often moreso than it appeals to other audiences. Other painters admire the paintings such artists make for their daring and original answers to the myriad "problems" of painting that every painter encounters over the course of learning the craft. 

Such a painter often revels in the material qualities and what painters call the "behavior" of the medium itself. They don't make "likable" pictures in the sense of basing their works on what artists of the past have discovered people like (and will therefore buy). They purposely put themselves beyond the reach of conventional representation and technique. 

Painters' painters therefore have an evident authenticity or honesty in their work - they're going on instinct and originality and it shows. They embody what all oil painters feel to some degree in the adventure of painting. By doing so their work ends up to some extent being about painting.

Such paintings, by their striking presence, literally embody the act of making art. When we encounter their paintings, instead of admiring the technique or interacting with the content alone, we feel the artwork as a reference to, and often a celebration of, art-making. I think painters send in it a signpost toward their own honesty and call to creative self-expression. Any work made this way, artwork with presence, feels fresh, honest, and celebratory and seems to me to exemplify the role of the artist as explorer of human existence. 

Some hallmark of "painters' painters" works I've loved:

Thick applications of paint (known by the Italian term "impasto") emphasize visible and expressive brushwork. Painting mediums like thickened linseed oil (stand oil) enhance the inherent buttery "juiciness" of oils. 

The enjoyment of an experimental unfettered spirit prove the limits of all those pesky concerns with accuracy and rule-following.  

Original (non-cliched) compositions avoid established harmonious design principles in favor of newly invented, intriguing geometries. Subject matter departs from the traditionally admired motifs of the history of painting (with which said history, and technique for that matter, the painter must be thoroughly acquainted in order to deliberately avoid repeating things already been done by someone else). 

The best "painterly paintings" (something by Rembrandt, Monet, Bonnard, Jennie Saville, Cecily Brown or Lois Dodd, for example) exude a fascination with the puzzle of art-making in general (why and how it's always been done). 

It seems to me all great art has some aspect of this presence about it. (An aside: As a yardstick to test a given theory of art, I often apply it to a trio of greats and see how well it stands up for all three: usually it's the cave paintings of Lascaux, Michelangelo's David and Sistine Chapel or Rembrandt's self-portraits, and either Monet's Water Lilies or Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm." In this case, I think any of these works can be said to have a great degree of presence partly due to the artist's handling of the material).

But even all of that is still just technique. Presence comes from something other than the surface aspects of "painterly painting," such as visible brushstrokes, drips and marks. A painting, to be more than a visual delight, has to have content. "Content" is a squishy word in art, but it's one we must use when we want to point to what sense the artist has put into the work - the complicated amalgam of specific emotions and ideas that elevate a work above mere representation or decoration. 

Bonnard is a painterly painter who also has content (his opulently painted, luminous domestic scenes and interiors reveal the splendor of the  everyday). Jenny Saville has content (her nudes wrench back a raw, suppressed reality from hundreds of years of oppressive idealization of femininity). However, this idea sometimes gets expressed as the dictum that paintings have to be "about" something, and plenty of artists find this idea irksome, and for good reason.  

Many artists detest the notion that their work has to "make a statement" for two reasons: 1. because of their personal devotion and love of the visual (as opposed to discursive) qualities of the medium and 2. their correct their sense that art comes from a wordless, mysterious, place that has nothing to do with "statements" about anything. They rightly sense that the strongest art should not, and indeed cannot, be reduced to a single meaning or message. But that doesn't mean it means nothing or has no content, does it?

I suggest that a serious problem with such reductionist attempts to pigeonhole art is precisely the failure to recognize presence - inherent in which is the unbreakable marriage of form and content - the union on the one hand of meaning, not in the form of a literal "this means that" formulation but in the form of evocation (something that triggers memory and association of ideas and experiences), and on the other hand, the glorious physical qualities of the medium itself.  

The Curious Case of the Too-Talented Artist

Robert Longo was once an art world rockstar. Alongside the likes of Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and David Salle, he became a "household" (ha! - not in 'Murca!) name. 

Above: This enormous, insanely destructive-looking wave drawing in charcoal dominates the room - it's a composite from photos, so it couldn't exist in nature. For Longo it's both an ominous nod to climate change and an homage to his lifelong love of surfing off of eastern Long Island. It's pretty intimidating to stand next to it in person. Sorry the pictures have glare and reflections in them (the red rectangle is an exit sign on the opposite wall); museums and galleries generally don't display charcoals any way other than under glass.

Longo was probably the most collected member of the "Pictures" generation, a group of young artists in the late 1970s  and early 1980s known for appropriating (and subverting) imagery from popular media. Many were photographers, but for Longo, a super-skilled draftsman, it was about forging new ways forward for representational painting, which had loudly been declared "dead" by influential theorists. 

Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art had spent the preceding decade shaking the pictorial tradition to its foundations, and that's when minimalism and conceptualism took the floor.

Yet Longo; unlike most of the other Pictures artists, was committed to - and hugely gifted at - using the traditional tools of art for representational imagery. He was and is capable of a stunning hyperrealism, and cites as major influences Rembrandt and Caravaggio. And despite the noise, the early '80s art world was buying.

Robot hand and closeup (2020-2021). Yes, this is in charcoal (as always, click for larger images).

 

When the backlash came, financial success put a very visible target on his back. Longo "got blamed for the '80s," he recently told Long Island Newsday. He was one of the best-selling artists at the very moment the "art market" as we know it was born: the cocaine-fueled, financially flush Reagan years, when everything began to serve the the interest of profit. As a highly valuable commodity to begin with, art slid easily into bed with business, spawning a new era in which seemingly facile, willfully provocative, or patently pleasing art could be made seemingly just to make millions (Schnabel, Hirst, Koons).

Native American Headdress (2020-2021) - below: detail.

Did I mention this is in charcoal?

So, basically Longo ran away. His peers reacted by making less-marketable work ever-more grotesque (Sherman, Levine),  aggressive (Salle), explicit (Kruger), and acridly critical of the mushrooming culture of capitalism and the increasing hollowness of the American dream. Instead, Longo hid in Paris, where he started all over building a new career in Europe. Along the way, he dropped out, "got lost for a while," raised three children and "missed the '90s" he says, though he used his time away from the art world to explore filmmaking and in fact directed Keanu Reeves in the highly successful film Johnny Mnemonic (1995).

When the urge to make art the old fashioned way came again, the only thing that came to hand was s "a bunch of shitty old charcoals," in his words, which he hated but couldn't put down. He started thinking about the fact that he was going all in on hand-crafting ever-more exquisitely tight pictures; yes, they're influenced by cinema and commercial photography, but he makes them using basically what cavemen used at the very birth of painting: dust from burnt sticks and ash. He kept going.

Last week, I happened to visit "History of the Present," Longo's extensive one-man show of vey recent work, up now at Guild Hall, a beautiful museum gallery space in East Hampton, NY.  Like everyone else who sees it, at first I thought I was looking at photographs.

Now, to me, massive skill and striking design are impressive, but they're not art - they are about technique,  and as such they are vehicles for art; it took Longo's own explanation of the show for me to see the art in these obviously beautiful hyperreal drawings. So in fact, I'm guilty of the very thing his latest work is designed to counter: our 21st century habit of assuming we have neither the time nor much of a need for sustained and careful looking and thinking.

Fallen bird's wing (2020-2021)

"We live in this world of an incredible image storm," he's said. "How to you get people to look at things more carefully? People look at my drawings and say, 'Oh, they're photographs,' and someone says, 'They're not photographs they're drawings',,,, that gets people to stop and look closer. It's a way to get people to look harder, more in depth.... I'm trying to create images that are more real than real. I've taken it to such an incredibly refined level." So much for technique. On to the art.

These are charged images of America's present. "The Agency of Faith," one of the two large galleries of his show. As Longo points out, a triangle of "American sin" can be traced between three of its potent images: a George Floyd protester, a cotton field, and a cropped image of an American Indian headdress.

"But at the same time, the drawing of the George Floyd protester is quite, I think, liberating," Longo said in an interview. "The translucence of the flag reflects the fragility of democracy. At the same time, the person carrying it is somewhat triumphant. Meanwhile, the world behind him burns."

George Floyd Protestor (2020-2021)

Although I didn't get it first, there's really no "hidden meaning," nothing overly complex or theoretical needing extensive wall text here (as in conceptualism) that someone drawn in by the enchantment and glamour of Longo's incredible skill wouldn't be able to see for herself. Context is all; as the wall plaque says, "A quiet wing of a fallen bird evinces vulnerability. Yet once the viewer encounters a drawing depicting a field of cotton alongside a drawing of a closely cropped Naiver American headdress, the seeming innocuousness of the natural imagery begins to unravel to expose a more provocative narrative."

This is art that requires thoughtful engagement, slowing down and "looking harder, more in depth." And while it isn't the kind of art dominating Artforum or the auction houses in London or New York at the moment, there is surely triumph enough in the way Longo's charcoal chiaroscuro "activates the power of beauty," as the wall text says, "seducing the viewer into a state of, if not unadulterated optimism, renewed faith in our agency to create possibilities for our future." And likewise there is triumph in Longo's return to making relevant art worthy of the talent he wields so well.