On Meeting Fairfield Porter on George Street

Plein-Air Tuesdays begin June 24!

I had an unexpected meeting with Fairfield Porter following the weekly Wednesday workshop I conduct at my studio in Lowell, Mass. 

As an exercise, we were using a the left hand side of a painting by George Inness as a starting point for "whatever might happen." Fools we!

Geo. Inness, June (1882)

We were thwarted at every turn! Sometimes the gods smile upon our efforts, sometimes not. We were probably looking too closely and anxiously; whatever, just trying to get the colors and the values right proved unusually painful. In the end, I mixed the greens using Corot's palette and left it at that.

Finally despairing of getting my study to look anything like the Inness, I went about the business of playing with what I did have in my painting to see if anything could be made of it before it became "a wiper." I have no problem wiping away a painting that isn't going to make it. "Know when you're licked," said Charles Woodbury. 

I confidently adhere to the doctrine that any painting is good painting because you're invariably learning something that will be useful later whether you realize it or not - an activity otherwise known as "paying your dues."

Here's the study after a student remarked that its real debt was to Fairfield Porter instead of Inness, and all it needed was a road. I was (and still aren't) that convinced, but the collision of the two (three if you count Corot) got me thinking about "influence" and how it works.

C. Volpe, A Morning Walk on George St., 8x10, oil on paper

Just for reference, here are a couple of landscapes by Fairfield Porter:

And one by Corot:

Let's face it, sometimes we're totally helpless; painting is a leap into the void! But it's interesting that while I was busy failing at my attempt to consciously adopt one painter's style (Inness's), others leaped into the breach and tried to help. Perhaps it just underscores the importance of looking at a lot of art with an open heart and mind - drinking deeply of what and why and allowing the art you love to penetrate your subconscious. 

That Corot is a high-res photo by the way, and if you right click on it and save the file to your computer, you'll be able to see the beautiful, shimmery gray strokes he used to make the magic of his ethereal foliage. Yup, I'm a fan.

Upcoming Classes and Workshops

The Ogunquit Summer School of Art (Ogunquit, Maine)

Plein-Air Tuesdays

Instruction in painting outdoors on Tuesday mornings from 9-1 in and around Perkins Cove, Ogunquit, Maine.

June 24, July 1, 8*, 15, 22, 29 

*July 8 class will be taught by Todd Bonita

Week-Long Workshop in OgunquitWith Todd Bonita

Team-taught plein-air instruction designed to foster spontaneous creativity while strengthening formal compositional and drawing skills.

September 25 - 29, 2014

Contact them at 603-819-9100

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Star Island (Isles of Shoals 

Plein-air painting day trip 9 miles off southern Maine and New Hampshire

June 29, 2014

Contact me about this.

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Cape Cod

"Beyond Plein Air" at Castle Hill Art Center, Truro

July 7 - July 11, 2014

Contact them at 508-349-7511

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Crawford Notch (New Hampshire's White Mountains)

Three-day workshop in the Whites. This is a pilot for a new Artist in Residence program I am helping to develop at the Appalachian Mountain Club's Highland Center Lodge.

September 26-28, 2014

Contact me about this.

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Cinque Terre (Italian Coast) 

A possible 2015 or 2016 workshop.

Contact me about this.

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Those interested in my ongoing weekly class in Lowell, MA should Contact me . 

Orpheus: The Artist as Poet

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861

At first glance, Corot's light-infused Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861) immortalizes the joyful emergence of Orpheus and Eurydice from the Underworld and their return to the breezy trees and light of living nature, which at this moment has never seemed so beautiful and precious. But wait - according to the Orpheus myth, they never made it back!

And sure enough, when we look again, we see the figures emerging from the mist in the background, their shadowy forms reflected in the quiet pool in the painting's mid-ground. These are surely shades, spirits of the dead. Orpheus and Eurydice, then, are still in Hades, just beginning their long (and doomed) journey back toward the land of the living, a journey that will end in ruin - though you'd never know it looking at Corot's lush, illuminated foliage, water, and hills.

Artists and poets have long used the Greek myth of Orpheus as a metaphor for aspects of the artist's life and creative processes.

In the classical myth as the Roman poet Ovid told it, Orpheus, the archetypal singer/poet, descended into the Underworld to rescue his bride, Eurydice, whom the Lord of the Underworld, Hades, had snatched away from the land of the living on their wedding day. Hermes told Orpheus he could go down to get her back but that he mustn't turn around to look at her until they were all the way out.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1870

Unfortunately, Orpheus turns to make sure she's still behind him, only to see her already insubstantial shade receding forever into the darkness below. Having now lost Eurydice twice, Orpheus concedes in despair that death has won. George Frederic Watts painted several different versions, both horizontal and vertical, of the relatively melodramatic moment when Orpheus understands his fate and desperately clings to the drooping, pallid corpse of his bride.

George Frederic Watts, Orpheus and Eurydice, c. 1873

Around the same time, the world's last great sculptor (ahem) Auguste Rodin, sculpted Orpheus and Eurydice half-emerging from the raw stone of his chunk of marble. The two figures seem at once to swoon with desire, lassitude, and inertia, as the cthonic forces of Hades impede their full ascent into airy daylight.

Auguste Rodin, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1877-98

Although here, because of the myth's outcome, it seems especially appropriate, Rodin often left ragged stone around his figures. It's part of the Modern, expressive character of his art, and it causes the figures to emerge from the stone (rather than being "carved from" it). It's also a metaphor for the Michaelangeloesque idea of the artist as creator-god who, through supreme spiritual (and physical!) effort, wrests beauty from primal chaos.

And the Orpheus myth echoes the same idea: The poet's song subdues nature. "Such was the grove of trees the poet gathered round him, and he sat in the midst of a crowd, of animals and birds," Ovid says. And when he mourns, so does the world itself. Ovid again: "the poet of Thrace, with [mournful] songs like these, drew to himself the trees, the souls of wild beasts, and the very stones that followed him."

So Orpheus spends the rest of his grief-stricken days singing about Eurydice and her loss, until a group of women intoxicated by their ecstatic worship of Dionysus come upon him and tear him apart in their frenzy. The last time we see him in in Ovid, some nymphs have discovered his decapitated head floating down their river, still singing in the melancholy tones that made him famous.

John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900

Our favorite French Symbolists, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, both envisioned Orpheus's head placed upon the symbol of his musical power - his lyre.

Gustave Moreau, Thracian Girl Carrying the Head of Orpheus on a Lyre, 1865

For Redon, the singer's disembodied head may serve as a symbolic embodiment of the painter himself. If so, in Redon's pastel, the figure emerges from a timeless, semi-abstract setting that we can see as both matter and spirit at once: clouds, mountain, river, flowers, stars, and mysterious light. Orpheus has become a stand-in for the otherworldly, mystical nature of the act of artistic creation.

Odilon Redon, Orpheus, c. 1903

With this in mind, recall Corot: his Orpheus lives at the moment when he still believes he will triumphantly lead the girl into broad daylight. Head intact, he lifts his lyre in victory, albeit premature. His body language says, "Onward and upward!" It's significant that, unlike the front-and-center characters in Watts, Redon, and Moreau, Corot's Orpheus and Eurydice are relatively small figures integrated into the overall landscape that makes up the true subject of the picture. Corot's depiction of the mythic symbol of art leads inexorably to a gorgeous landscape. After all, for Corot painting landscapes and happiness were one and the same.

I like to read Corot's version of the myth, devoid of any hint of a dark side, as a declaration of his creed: the modern artist must reinvent art as a celebration of this life, of the world as it appeals to our senses, seeking out the beautiful moments, however brief, that life interposes between the inevitable tragedies and disasters.