Islands Oceanic

This month I am out upon the Isles of Shoals as often as possible. It's a series of rocky, windswept islands nine or so miles off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire: Rhythmic surf, whitewashed wooden structures, tenacious sea-roses, bleached and battered stone. 

Nineteenth-century painters and men-and-women-of-letters once gathered for "salons" here, particularly upon Appledore Island, where poet Celia Thaxter lived. Thaxter wrote enduring descriptive essays about the life and history of the islands. It was she who convinced Frederick C. Hassam to add the archaic "e" to his middle name ("Child") in the manner of Byron's Childe Harold.

Childe (1859-1935), as everyone indeed called him, was an early American adopter of the methods of the French Impressionists. He rejected conventional academic training and technique in the manner of another frequent visitor to the island, the very influential Boston artist and teacher William Morris Hunt. I've written extensively about Hunt's Francophile influence on American art here.

"Seeing big" and expressing sensations directly is going to be a significant part of a workshop I'm leading on the Isles of Shoals next month. I will be exhibiting some 15-20 new paintings of the Isles of Shoals at the Portsmouth Discovery Center this August.

Childe Hassam, watercolor, the Isles of Shoals

Sometimes Hassam seems to paint the morning light striking the veins of quartz and feldspar that form the jagged island coasts as though responding in paint to Celia Thaxter's prose: 

"The sea is rosy, and the sky; the line of land is radiant; the scattered sails glow with the delicious color that touches so tenderly the bare, bleak rocks. These are lovelier than sky or sea or distant sails, or graceful gulls' wings reddened with the dawn; nothing takes color so beautifully as the bleached granite; the shadows are delicate, and the fine, hard outlines are glorified and softened beneath the fresh first blush of sunrise." ("Among the Isles of Shoals," 1875).

Childe Hassam, oil, The Isles of Shoals

My own challenge is to forget Hassam's work but to remember his achievement and to take him at his word: "Subjects suggest to me a color scheme and I just paint." 

"An artist should paint his own time and treat nature as he feels it," he said, "not repeat the same stupidities of his predecessors." In Hassam's case, I think we'd have to substitute "successes" for "stupidities." But the sense of what he says rings true, and the implications for the practice of painting are huge.

Above: painting friends Mary Graham, Donald Jurney, and Todd Bonita joined me on a recent painting trip to Star Island, Isles of Shoals. The lot of us painting out there looked more 1912 than 2012.

As I take it, lived courageously the act of painting sometimes leads to moments of fuller being. That's what I'm really chasing on the Shoals. In the words of one of Hassam's truest successors, Robert Henri, "what we need is more sense of the wonder of life, and less of the business of making a picture."

John Henry Twachtman, Reckless Visionary

John Henry Twachtman, Gloucester Harbor Scene, c. 1901

Twachtman's sense of design is utterly masterful. On a recent trip to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, I sat for a while in front of the above painting and sketched it as a way of plumbing its mysteries. Deceptively simple, the interlocking geometric shapes, the subtle, asymmetrical arrangement of values, the vibrating colors - as with a lot of paintings I respond to, I experienced the whole thing gathering itself into a marvelous representation then threatening to collapse into random marks of colored paint only to gather itself once again into a representation on the verge of disintegration. 

John Henry Twachtman (1853 – 1902) was among a group of American Impressionists called The Ten who boycotted the commercial art market at the end of the 19th century. A restless experimenter, he pledged no allegiance to a single style. He was among the most original, modern, and poetic of his peers, either unwilling or unable to interest buyers in derivative or simply pretty images. His devotion to his personal vision brought him strong admiration from fellow artists, who deemed him a 'painter's painter' ahead of of his time.  

Twachtman, Edge of the Emerald Pool at Yellowstone

Few 19th century landscape artists were as willing or able to disregard convention and devote themselves to such a personal brand of Impressionism, not to mention such beautiful and radically simplified renderings of spontaneous experience. Look at the rich, boldly abstract color pattern in that Emerald Pool above! 


In Along the Fence (below), Twachtman takes a similar minimalist approach to big ideas. Here the treatment of humble subject matter, ennobled by a perfect degree of detail and a dignified composition, expresses the profound significance of the simplest dusty corner of the inhabited word. Twachtman's eye has singled out an anonymous series of warped, nailed-up boards mired in muddy earth-tones that, soaked as they are in generations of human presence, tell a strangely rich tale of human history expressed in the simplest imaginable terms. 


Thoreau said "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." By virtue of everything it leaves out, Along the Fence is an absolute treasure. 

Twachtman, Along the Fence

Here is Arques-la-Bataille, which some consider one of his greatest masterpieces. 

John Henry Twachtman, Arques-la-Bataille, 1885

As Linda Crank points out, there's a quiet circular composition underlying the whole: 


"First, the bold block of dark grass at center bottom commands the eye. Then the smaller clump to the middle left causes it to travel to the middle left. From there a variety of smaller shrubbery and grasses propel the vision around to the right in a circular motion. Strong horizontal lines emphasize the calmness of the foggy morning." 


Many of Twachtman's works, including Arques-la-Bataille, turn their backs on the established canon of Western aesthetics. Instead, they can often exhibit the sort of subtlety one finds in a Japanese garden, where objects are arranged in such a way as to relate at once to the random quality of "design" in nature and to our human hunger for the sense of a harmonious whole. I love the fresh, un-cliched design of the darks and lights in this tonalist piece:

Although I admit to having made pilgrimages to Gloucester, Rockport and similar locales, in this case, for me there's little mystique to where Twachtman painted. It's his absolute sincerity, his depth of thought and feeling, and his faithfulness to his responses to the immediate subject that make him great.


Twachtman's great paintings balance representation and abstraction in a very poetic, and at once very modern and classically restrained manner. His later works such as the Gloucester Harbour pictures above and below anticipate a style of painting that wouldn' t become popular until long after European Modernism came to America in 1911. One could do worse than to spend a day at the feet of such a master.

Twachtman, Goucester Harbor

Landscape Painting As Exploration

Yesterday I told my weekly Wednesday night students to turn their easels toward the window and paint the view from the studio, which happened to offer stray clouds drifting across a silvery evening sky above the industrial skyline of Lowell Mass: slate-gray rooftops, yellow-gray warehouses, re-sided duplexes and apartment houses. 

View of Haarlem, Van Ruisdael, 1670s. NOT the view from my studio. 

My students rose admirably to the challenge of responding directly in paint to what they saw. It seemed to me that everybody got some very good painting out of it, and of course the experience of painting from life like that, as the light changes and the colors shift, is invaluable for an understanding of what painting is. It's the moment when you have to fall back on your own intuitions to select your subject from the vast choices you're given.

Houses on a Hill, Cezanne, c. 1880.

I told them later that painting "from the hip" like that offers an opportunity to test one's innate interests and strengths - what worked? Was it something to do with a particular color or color combination? An evocative mood? Paint handling - hints of expressive technique? It's a chance to suspend judgment and find out where the act of painting wants to lead you. 

The Seine at Pecq, Maurice de Vlaminick, 1905.

I think it's most important to recognize one's interests and one's strengths and to figure out how to "play to" them in your work, which can also mean downplaying other aspects of the craft to foreground one's intent. Technique is important, so is valuing one's perception of the world (and one's beliefs about art) and developing a personal language of image, line, mass, color, composition, paint handling, everything. This is what YOUR art is all about. And ultimately, THAT is what's going to matter to you over time as well as what people will respond to in your paintings. 

Does that make sense?

At the beginning, I think, the way to fall in love with painting is to get away from critical judgment about what you might be doing "right" or "wrong" (by what and whose standards, for heaven's sake, right?!). In the end, after all the training, all the absorption of technique and tradition, all the talk and critical thinking, when there's a brush in your hand, maybe "you just go on your nerve," like poet Frank O'Hara said; act first, from intuition and emotion, and then, after the dust clears, ask: What choices did you find yourself making - and why? 

Landscape by Stuart Shils, c. 2005.

For my part, right now I find I'm interested in expressing a moment of aesthetic experience encompassing broad gestures of color and paint and the "right" details for that painting. 

I think it's a worthy goal to assimilate and adapt as much technique and art history as one can learn. Guided by experience, it is the well from which one draws to discover what one's own work is "about," an important consideration, as friend and fellow landscape painter Donald Jurney is wont to insist. 


And of course, work can be "about" so many things - color, texture, humanity, redemption, damnation, pure emotion, tension, peace, light and shade, the curve of a shoreline, the age of an oak, the tentative character of saplings in spring, beauty, terror - indeed all "the joy and fear of existence." 

Mystery and Poetic Painting

Emil Carlsen, Still Life with Brass and Oysters

A post on "Mystery" over at oil painter Stapleton Kearns' blog has me thinking about the importance of indeterminacy in my own work and its role in what's often called "poetic" painting.

As Stape points out, by the subtle use of soft edges and careful value adjustments a painter can suggest what's in the picture (and even what isn't!) without having to fully describe it. 

If "prosaic painting" describes, poetic painting evokes. A refreshing sense of control comes in simply realizing that one needn't (and probably shouldn't) delineate every part of a picture with equal clarity (a hallmark, by the way, of so-called primitive painting; selective detail is learned from the history of painting). 

George Inness, Georgia Pines

When it's done properly, "leaving something for the viewer's imagination" (the way George Inness does in the landscape above) invites a deeper engagement. Look how vague (or "suggestive," I should say) the details are throughout, even where the action is, in the middleground and at the horizon. On a surface level, the viewer must participate to "complete" the picture, filling in details where none are given. Such a painting discloses itself in stages, unfolding gradually as elements assemble before the viewer. The result is a vital, animated work of art that offers an experience full of freshness and life.

Taken a step further into metaphysics, however, the use of indeterminacy in painting can correlate with the unspoken, if not the unsayable - the ineffable in poetry and in human experience. 

George Inness, Green Marches

For me, indeterminacy functions in much of Inness's "visionary" work by evoking what I'd call the unknowable quality of felt experience. Hence: mystery. In Inness's "Green Marshes," the entire painting takes on the indistinct, shimmering quality of an emotion, a memory, or a dream.

The material world in Inness's later paintings often borders on insubstantial because for Inness, painting increasingly became a way to explore the dual nature of the world as simultaneously "material" and divine. The late works function as expressions of (or analogues for) spiritual experience. 

William James noted that one of the defining characteristics of mystical experience is that it cannot adequately be put into words. The painter interested in mystery paints that which "cannot be pictured," that is, things that can only be suggested and evoked yet never fully defined.

George Inness, In the Orchard, Milton

Innes's In the Orchard, Milton contains very little that is clearly delineated besides the sinuous tree trunk in the middle of the composition (which itself has the quality of semi-transparency). The rest is so suggested that at first I thought the lighter vertical element to the right of the curvy trunk was the sunlit trunk of a larger tree. Suddenly the figure of the woman coming toward us on the path vaporously emerged. The entire work comes to resemble a translucent tapestry, a lacy, gossamer veil swaying between one world and the next.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger described truth itself as aletheia, as an opening up, a "poetic revealing." In Being and Time, he describes meaning as a bringing-forth, rather than something we impose on the world. For Heidegger, meaning is a process of unconcealment, illuminating the essence of Being. By way of example, he writes about how Van Gogh's painting of a pair of old shoes conveys elements essential to humanity's relationship to the earth and, by extension, nature as a whole.

Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886)

By virtue of how suggestive these shoes are - not what the painting shows but what it alludes to, what such an image evokes about the life that has been lived in them - Heidegger  (and other philosophers, more or less) see an artist conceptualizing and presenting the essence of "shoeness."

For Heidegger, too, there's a "shining" quality to art's revelation of essential Being, something not unlike the "radiance" in Joyce's translation of Aquinas's model of beauty as wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Heidegger writes, "this shining (the "shining" of illuminated Being) joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealedness" (Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art). If any true work of art would have this quality of showing forth essence or Being, the indeterminacy and "mystery" in Inness functions both as a visual metaphor for, as well as the enactment of it.

But this is mere description, and utterly subjective. A painting just is. As my friend Dermot O'Brien recently reminded me, certain strangely emotive and vital works of art and literature magnificently and simply "refuse to permit reductive explication, much like life and love."

The Rewaking

William Nicholson, Flowers and Glass Jug

Sooner or later

we must come to the end

of striving

to re-establish

the image the image of

the rose

but not yet

you say extending the

time indefinitely

by

your love until a whole

spring

rekindle

the violet to the very

lady’s-slipper

and so by

your love the very sun

itself is revived

-William Carlos Williams

Plein-Air Workshop in April

Pigeon Cove, 8x10, plein-air oil on linen, 2012

There are still several spaces left in my four-week plein-air painting class that will run four Sundays in a row, from April 15 through May 6. We'll be painting in southern Maine, New Hampshire (York, Newcastle, Rye) and Rockport, Mass.

Our approach will be about seeing - perception, feeling, and expression - more than it will be about accuracy in color or drawing, although these will be covered too. I will be emphasizing simplification, spontaneity, and “seeing big.” We’ll be making sincere records of fresh experiences that can function both as finished paintings in their own right and as studies for larger, more conceptual work in the studio.

These classes ARE appropriate for the absolute beginner as well as for the experienced painter looking to loosen up and stray a bit further into personal expression. I have two primary goals for everyone, including myself: to develop a unique, expressive painting style and to have a great time doing it. Tuition is $200.

If you're interested in more information, like the materials list and tentative locations, please give me a shout.

Spring at Maudslay

Spring is here and the time is right for painting in the streets, or at least amid the faded glory of former East India Trading Company estates in coastal Massachusetts.

I and two fellows of the fraternity of painters convened at Maudslay State Park in Newburyport yesterday to essay our impressions of nature. My small painting bears very little resemblance to the crystal-blue qualities of the day, but that is in keeping with my current practice of taking the subject as a starting point for however strong a painting the thing deigns to become.

Early Spring at Maudslay, Newburyport, MA 6x8

The grounds of this place are just full of beautiful views and endless motifs. The Merrimack River winds by it. In addition to the maintained grounds, one encounters old stone bridges and sealed wells, disused formal gardens and boarded-up outbuildings that attest to a formerly magnificent Old World empire, all beautiful with the earth still dormant in the tremulous light of spring.

Landscape painter Donald Jurney is offering a workshop at Maudslay in May. I highly recommend it.

I catch myself mentally saying "Maudslay" to myself over and over (like "Manderlay" I guess) and pronouncing it "MAW-dslee" in a ridiculously pompous British accent. I just can't help imagining it populated (sparsely, of course) with figures from an Edward Gorey drawing.