New Year; New Maxims

The impromptu color combinations on my stirring sticks often suggest color combinations that might work in the paintings.

2.11.13

Every year, I try to encapsulate some lessons I feel I'm learning, or need to begin learning, for my artistic practice. This year, they emerged while frenetically preparing the paintings for my latest show, and were fine-tuned while talking with both friends and strangers at the show's opening and First Friday receptions. They are as follows (with some explanation): 

Loosen Up

My tendency is to be very tight with my paint application, relying heavily on taping, masking, stencils, tracing, compassing, and so on. One visitor, a stranger to me, but a fellow painter in his sixties, complimented my work at the exhibit, but then said, "these lines (pointing to a work with harshly taped yellow lines) make me say, why the hell doesn't he just paint it?" And then he laughed and reminded me that he liked my work, and that he felt he had the right to speak with me this way, since he had been painting for fifty years or so. I was fine with this, and thanked him for his candor, and realized he had touched on something that I'd been feeling tapping me on the back, but hadn't taken the time to mentally articulate. Thus, the first maxim: not a hard rule, by any means - I'm not going to give up the tape, the stencils, or the masking, since these are my tools - but I'm also going to keep a reminder near that I should also rely on those other, even simpler tools at my disposal: steady hands; quality brushes that make a good edge - a human edge - all by themselves; and an ease of application which comes from knowing these tools well. 


Mix it Up

This one is loosely based on a maxim from a previous year, where I saw the need to begin adding more diverse paint application styles to my repertoire: not just straight, flat paint, but scumbling; spraying, with spray paint or stiff brush; thin paint layers, and layers bleeding through each other. In other words, allow the paint and other materials to be all that they can be; get them to do as much as is possible. Make the paint itself the most versatile tool it can be. So, in a way, this maxim is a reminder that this needs to continue. I thank the work of Corey Antis, which I sat with for hours at a time while monitoring Tiger Strikes Asteroid, for originally pushing me to this realization.


Keep it Up

Ultimately, the most simple and the most challenging one of the three: consistency. At my new location, I've resolved to eek out as much time from my week as possible, without unduly stealing from other important parts of my life, to spend in the studio. Keep plowing forward, expecting a good crop to result. An old adage, but a good one. This is tempered, of course, by my feeling that I need to squeeze out of every element in a picture the most it can provide. In other words, work with less elements, but make each element work as hard as it possibly can for the overall benefit of the picture. This is not easy, but very satisfying when it is working well.


I plan on making a sign of these to hang in the studio this year. Let's see how they look at the end of the year, what they might lead to pictorially, and which maxims might emerge as I move on.

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Art Thoughts, Week 39 -- Demuth & Progress

Masts, Charles Demuth (American, 1883—1935) 1919, tempera on composition board, BF343.

America has always been a place of transition; of change; a country of forward resolve and restlessness. There is a continuous line of transitional figures and groups that make a bold line across the country, east to west and north to south. In many ways, the conquests that began America have never ceased. Perhaps this is linked to our unique place in the world as a cobbled-together entity, as opposed to a country with deeply-rooted common cultural identities – we are always adjusting; recalibrating – looking for something new. This mentality comes out more strongly at some times than others, and more strongly in some art than others. In art, this is often coincidental, or at least situational. Important art is always interested in meaningful progress; not always the society.

A case where society and art seemed to be in syncopation is in Masts, by Charles Demuth. Painted in 1919, there is in this painting a curious mix of both revelry in our country’s progressive past, and a sense of the massive, global sigh, having just exited from the Great War. The former is expressed through the beautifully stylized and honed lines of masts and booms of harbored ships in Nantucket; the latter may be seen in the optimistic dynamism with which Demuth has composed the formal shapes of the scene. He has taken a cliché of traditional art – the harbor or boating scene – and divested it of sentimental identity, then distills it into a sleek, modernist machine of upward and onward progress. The romanticism of boats – not unlike other romantic American tropes, such as the cowboy or mountains – was, and still is an Achilles heel for many artists who are seduced by the tendency to soft-pedal critique of American myth. Demuth, however, has uncovered the mix which ended up being the key to the progression of American art towards the forefront: he has isolated certain elements of the ships – the masts and booms, namely – and juxtaposed them with the harbor roof-tops. They create an alternative mythic machine of progress, its arms spread like a drawn crossbow, ready to jet forward with brutal and ruthless speed; and a full quiver to boot. Herein, as we later come to discover, is this idea’s weak spot: the unvarnished optimism. Who can blame the country, however, emerging from an unprecedented blood bath?

Demuth emphasizes this potential change and progress symbolically, as well. The most dynamic of these symbols is the bolting line which meanders crisply through the masts, eventually flying out of the picture space. Additionally, the composition moves dramatically from dark to light; from larger elements to smaller, creating a culmination; an acme; a focus on the tip-top. It is also a common factor, drawing as it does the two more disparate elements of the composition’s bottom into the bound rope of a goal at the top. There are two other subtle elements of this painting which are both interesting contrasts, and also highlight those two essential parts of meaningful progress: the past and the future. Firstly, Demuth has used a medium which is a bastion of traditional painting craft, tempera. And secondly, the execution is not filled with the accoutrements of realism, as tempera is wont to encourage; it is rather sporting the cartoonish polish of purposeful stylization. Both of these point to Demuth’s talent in meshing the traditional and futuristic, and therefore seeming supremely prepared to comment on societal change and progress. The best artists are limnal in function; becoming a Janus for their society.

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