Some Thoughts on Painting

Enrique Martinez Celaya, The Education, 2015

I think that, for whatever unclear reasons, artists walk through this world burdened with a feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction with the conditions of human life as it's lived day to day. 

Enrique Martinez Celaya, The Burning

Then one day they encounter a great work of art (it could be a painting, a novel, a poem, a piano concerto…) and suddenly they fall in love with the idea that it is possible to improve those conditions - to elevate humanity above its habitually low level of consciousness by bringing into existence tangible manifestations of a full life, in fact the best of human thought and feeling.

Enrique Martinez Celaya, The Confession

Something in this individual silently devotes itself to this "mission" of accessing a deeper, more meaningful reality in themselves and bringing into existence objects and experiences (works of art) that make those states both evident and accessible to others. 

Then begins a difficult but inevitable though often uplifting lifetime of trying and mostly failing to achieve something: art, the only thing worth doing.

This is often described as a "calling." - All this no matter how unlikely the odds that they will ever create anything on an equal footing with the great works of the great artists in history. This project of living a more authentic life, of really seeing and thinking and feeling and wanting to share that through the practice of art, is what inspires great artists to create. 

All authentic art - that is, art that's honest, in which the artist has created from within without relying over much on the successes of his or her predecessors - has the beneficial effect of allowing people open to experiencing the art to awaken to their own untapped potential as thoughtful, feeling individuals. 

Most people live lives of "quiet desperation" always looking over their shoulder at those around them and doing what they think they are supposed to do or what other people (i.e. society) want or coerce them into doing. 

We live in a completely commercialized culture in which nearly everyone behaves as if acquiring money is the goal (whether or not they consciously believe this, and very few actually do, nevertheless it's is how many's days are spent because so few believe they have any other choice). Strong art does what economically driven societies and communities only do as an afterthought, if at all - it creates moments of meaningful human expression and communication, celebrating the "impractical" areas of human experience (dreams, imagination, sensation, ideas) providing nourishment for thought, feeling, and perception. 

I didn't start painting until the age of 41, but I'd been on an artistic path (as a poet, in fact) since the age of 16. I fell in love with painting after discovering the great works of American painters from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which until then I had never truly seen or understood. I knew I loved it as soon as I smelled the linseed oil I use every day and saw the first colors taking form under my brush. 

I follow Gaugin’s advice as best I can:

“Paint freely and madly; you will make progress… Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately …  Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result."

While ordinary visual seeing is a given, artistic seeing is a matter of spirit - which is to say, the artist’s inner life of imagination, memory, and sensation, compounded with one’s highest ideals concerning art and life. These things inform the kind of work one wants to make, and this in turn literally informs what and how one sees in the world. 

One's artistic practice should always be about the struggle for self knowledge. It mustn’t revolve around technique, conception, or even perception alone.

Painting is a manifestation of being; it's a concretized form of self-development that never has to end as long as one lives. 

Enrique Martinez Celaya (studio wall)


All paintings in the post are by Cuban-American painter Enrique Martinez Celaya.

The Damned: Notes on Becoming an Artist, Part 1

What is painting? To be a painter is to enter into an infinitely chaotic conversation between yourself, the work, and the world. The problem is compounded because each of these elements takes multiple forms at different times. 

Looking, thinking, painting. Self, work, world. In practice, it’s apparently impossible to separately identify and define these terms: beacons blinking on and off in the fog.

Gerhard Richter, Ice Berg in Fog

Antonio Lopez-Garcia’s work teaches us that art emerges from what is closest to us - the small epiphanies of everyday life, the glimpses into larger things. I just looked up from these notes to see my six-year-old son perched atop a stool and when I saw the smooth, swanlike angle of his head and neck, I felt mortality, the fragility of life - a very small glimpse of the beauty and sorrow of humanity. 

Kenneth Blom, Portrait, 2000

Nothing matters except the articulation of that feeling (I wonder, must it be that image as well? Or can something seemingly unrelated embody that feeling “instinctively?” I suspect something like this is going on in many of my landscapes). 

To be an artist is to be constantly tantalized by the fruit you can almost see, touch, smell. But the truth is that you’re blindfolded, and every time your fingertips seem to touch the tender rind, it sways beyond your reach. Go ahead, form a coherent theory about what you’re doing and why! And watch as the bottom of every conceptual framework you apply falls away beneath you. And there you are, standing at the easel for another day. 

Roland Petersen, Spring Picnic, 1963

Vermeer: A Stillness in Mirrors

The Art of Painting (1665-1666; oil on canvas, 47x40) by Jan Vermeer

For a while, Dutch artist Jan Vermeer (1632-75) lived like a king, amassing an extraordinary collection of "curiosities" - exotic seashells, ancient sculpture, rich silks, books, tapestries, paintings, maps, historical weapons and armor ... but when he died, his wife had to forfeit the estate and sell off his paintings (which nobody wanted) just to keep herself and their 11 children out of debtor's prison.

Lyme Connecticut artist Jerry N. Weiss has published a wonderful interpretation of Jan Vermeer's The Art of Painting (1665-1666) in The Artist's Magazine this month. His article strikes a balance between explaining the painting's content and celebrating the artist's technical and aesthetic achievements.

Vermeer was supreme, Weiss writes, in his ability to use "the physical property of light to evoke a revelatory experience in everyday life." The light in Vermeer is bewitching; it's directional but never harsh, and the way it reveals form and color allows us to sense the very quality of the air it passes through.

Weiss nods briefly to the painting's typically Dutch allegorical symbolism before passing on to highlight the work's remarkable clarity, its precise, asymmetrical design, its "cool reserve and pitch-perfect tones." The stillness is almost like that of a reflection in a mirror. Vermeer suspends and plays his two figures off of each other by turning them gracefully in opposite directions, almost like dancers, balancing the model's left-pointing trumpet with the artist's right-pointing mahl stick and literally drawing lines (the map's border) between to connect them.

Vermeer's finesse is even more remarkable given the chaos of his life. He may have been a creative genius, but to his eventual downfall, he had only one main patron, a wealthy merchant in his hometown of Delft, who bought up Vermeer's painstakingly crafted paintings but thereby kept the artist's fame from spreading. When the French suddenly invaded the country, the Dutch economy collapsed, and disposable income for luxury items like paintings dried up. Jan was stuck, and not even his day job (art dealer=more luxury!) could save him.

How visionary then, the special stillness in Vermeer's "self portrait," partly the result, as Weiss's piece suggests, of its magical combination of cool light and complex pattern. Vermeer's poetic vignettes transcend the narrative, as his figures transcend their settings, interacting "as if in a dream suspended."

What really moves us in Vermeer's The Art of Painting, Weiss concludes, is how it imparts, even after 400 years, "the blessing of absolute stillness, the Zen of north light." Hear, hear.