 |
| 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 20th 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 17th, 18th, and 19th
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.”
