Successful Failures

For today, just two quotes and some pictures:

Stephanie London

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill

(That's a favorite of mine.) This one's by George Nick, the painter:


"One is usually bewildered by all the sensations of real life. And the impossibility and danger tempts us.... 

Lucien Freud self portrait

... So we struggle like headless chickens flouting madly about at anything to try to succeed...

Ross Blechner, Architecture of the Sky

... That drives us beyond our capabilities and thrills us if we even succeed a little. With dogged practice we bleed and grow.... 

Cy Twombley, "So Says Sarah"

.... We eventually live in a state of constant failure with little sparks of surprises that we do not control or understand and realize we are where we really want to be."

Lennart Anderson, Standing Nude

Onward and upward.

Antonio Lopez Garcia, a still life

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 . 

An Exercise in Expressiveness

I recently had a chance to try out some new exercises with two different groups of painters in classes on Cape Cod and at Star Island. The site of a practically untouched 1870s hotel, Star Island is part of the Isles of Shoals, a group of rocky yet beautiful and timeless islands lying 10 miles off the New Hampshire coast.

A painting of mine of the cliff known as
"Miss Underhill's Chair" on Star Island

In one exercise, the challenge was to paint a wholly expressive, abstract interpretation of the environment. The exercise started with a meditative walk in which we tried to be wholly present and to soak up impressions and "notice what we noticed" - a flash of color, the sweep of a cloud, the jut of rock or a root.

Next we returned to the studio and purposely did not paint anything that looked like the location. Armed only with our fresh impressions and memories, we specifically painted not what we saw but what we felt - not our ideas about what the physical place looked like but non-objective, expressive corollaries of the sensations we received from being there.

The point was not to make a masterpiece but to tap into something genuine. Even if the painting "failed" as traditional Western art, it would succeed in its truth and each artist's painting would truly be his or her own.

As it turned out, many of these paintings were not only expressive but also extraordinarily "good" paintings - exciting and surprising works conveying palpable moods and unique perspectives.

Finding and expressing one's heart's truth in painting is a mysterious, blindfolded affair; so much of it comes from parts of us that are inaccessible to rational thought. But we can control what we don't do - we can refuse the rational mind's insistence on what makes a "good composition," we can get around the rule of thirds, the rules of perspective, color theory and proportion.

I think it's probably a good idea sometimes to slip out the back door of the expected and the received and see what happens. 

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

Looking, Thinking, Painting

I have a friend who knows far more about art than I do, to whom I occasionally show my work (when I get up the nerve). He recently managed to soothe my oft-times fevered brow with some brief encouragement and the words, "keep looking, thinking, and painting."

Landscape by Bruce Crane (c. 1910)

"That'll happen, anyway," I thought to myself - but his words kept coming back to me with increasing gravity. Looking, thinking, and painting. 

Actually, what else is there? Doing just these three things with intense passion, thoughtfulness, and dedication are precisely what's required of a good painter. 

Richard Diebenkorn, Cityscape, 1963

From here, there are many different ways to go. Personally, I tend to think a lot about painting (why I love art history and why I write this blog). It seems to me that the purpose of painting is not simply to produce a more or less "faithful" copy (faithful to what, exactly?) of something (a particular tree in a particular hilly field, or a particular cityscape in California, for example). We have cameras for that. I believe with Charles Woodbury that “a picture is a thought or feeling expressed in terms of Nature.” The rest of that sentence reads: “The method is a matter of the moment….Clear sight, clear thought, clear expression; the thought should depend on the sight, and the expression on the thought.” Sight, thought, and expression = looking, thinking, and painting = "observations, concentration then application," so said Frederick Waugh as well.

You probably already believe, as I do, that painting has more to do with seeing than with technique. Let's face it, the technique of painting is much easier to learn than the lifelong task of knowing oneself. I think one of painting’s amazing qualities is how it “opens our eyes” to our role in creating meaning via the links between "sight, thought, and expression."

Winslow Homer, Artists Sketching in the White Mountains

I'm turning this over in my mind because I'm going to be teaching a plein-air workshop at Crawford Notch in the White Mountains next week (Monday & Tuesday, June 17 & 18). Mindful that it’s probably not possible or even desirable to consciously control the whole process while immersed in the act of painting itself, this three-tiered foundation will be our premise and our guide. Seeing with fresh eyes is the essential first tier; thought, the subjective response, follows from the initial perception; technique serves to express the artistic experience.

Titian, Rape of Europa (detail)

I get more excited thinking about teaching people to use painting as a means of heightening perception, deepening self knowledge, and becoming a more fully realized person than I do thinking about teaching technique. 

Brice Marden, Vine, 1992-93

Do you teach technique or artistic seeing? A little of both? As we all know, it’s entirely possible for students to follow the principles of freedom and self-expression and to produce failed paintings, concluding (almost certainly wrongly) that they have no talent. The reason for this, I think, is that painting, like any creative act, implies an audience (even if only of one), and therefore one must balance the freedom of personal expression with technical means and with a related aesthetic (e.g. "loose," impressionistic, realist, tonalist, semi-abstract, etc.), a manner or style either consciously chosen or inherited. 

Antonio Lopez-Garcia, The Dinner, 1971-80

Alternately, many students of painting believe they are “learning to paint” when they are merely learning the techniques behind a particular painter’s aesthetic. I don't want to teach technique or a particular aesthetic approach, but I do want to teach students how to make "good paintings." Am I wrong to sense that this depends on something separate from, maybe prior to, technique? I want  my students to be very happy with their paintings, but I want them to really be their paintings.

A RAVISHINGLY SEEN and painted landscape by John Singer Sargent

What are your thoughts on teaching and learning to paint? What do you think of the idea of breaking it down into "clear sight, clear thought, clear expression" - looking, thinking, painting?

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

Still Life with Key

"The essence of art is sensitivity. How does one retain the freshness of sensitivity? Answer: By working without worry, freely. How does one work freely? By possessing a technique which permits one to work spontaneously: it is necessary, therefore, to possess the elements of this technique. Meditation in front of the works of the masters puts one in possession of the eternal rules of art. Once these rules are learned there is nothing left but to know how to apply them to one's own temperament."

-Andre Lhote 1923