I am visiting the Wattenmeer (mud flats) where I grew up.
Walking along the dyke at low tide as a child, I learned to appreciate nature’s different hues and textures of grey.
The rich life in the mud attracts seagull and naturalists alike.
In the early 80ties, I discovered about Richard Estes’ photorealism. I looked at the colors of concrete, steel and mirrors in his paintings and then recognized and reveled in the same wealth of grey hues in NYC.
Did where you played as a child also influence your taste in art?
Birgit:
Actually there was next to no art where I played as a child. It was Mennonite farmer stock on my father’s side and blue collar on my mother’s. The closest work of art – presented as such – was a large tatty painting of William Penn and a group of Indians at the capitol building in Harrisburg and a baggy, smoke stained diorama of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg in Gettysburg. I saw neither more than once. I’m happy to report that the diorama was restored and now hangs in it’s own gallery. It is an excellent example of French 19th century history painting with a tonality approaching the Impressionist palette. I saw it originally in a state of affliction, having been illuminated for many decades by oil lamps, the better to be seen by a cigar smoking, chew spitting crowd.
The biggest influence for me was aviation as I grew up next to an Air Force base. I became a small expert on the feel and texture of aircraft in motion. For me the sublime was standing in front of a Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp engine as it was being run up in a test cell. For some reason I like aluminum paint.
Birgit, those are lovely grays and textures in your photo of the mud flats. I like the line of the footprints and how one also sees the sky.
That’s an interesting question about childhood influences, but at the moment I’m drawing a total blank. I can’t think of anything growing up in semi-suburban Minnesota and Wisconsin that seems related to art I like (very eclectic) or make.
Growing up in India is always a good thing. The grittiness of life is always in your face (of course with growing affluence and westernization, a lot of homes look like the bland boxes symptomatic of suburbia in the United States today). But 30 years back, Bangalore, India was great. Colors were everywhere, from the muddy brown monsoon waters rushing unchecked in the open gutters to vermillion bindis on the foreheads of married women to gaudy temple gopurams rising proudly over the dusty skyline that was mostly 10 feet tall to resplendent cotton saris painted with mind numbing hues of color. Yes, it was color that forms my memories of growing up in India. Even the grass (whatever little we had) had a vibrancy unmatched today. The golden light of the sun reflecting off the young coconuts on pregnant coconut tress was magical. I think those times may have influenced my work now – I am not so sure…
Birgit and Sunil:
Sunil, your comment does bring something back. My uncle Ralph was stationed in WWII as a mechanic with a group of B-29s flying out of China and India. In his home was a box that I begged for on every visit. It contained amazing textiles and other objects adorned with bright metallic threads and colors. These were identified as Indian, but I heard little more as he was reticent about his war experiences. It put me on notice that there was more out there than chrome grillwork and flashy neckties.
Birgit,
The first photo is delicious. The composition is perfect. And you’ve captured the atmosphere.
I grew up in the ridge and valley section of north central Pennsylvania and now love the high desert landscape. Go figure. But I do know that I always loved being able to look a long way.
Jay,
It is fabulous that you have a sense for airplanes in motion. – One of my heroes is Chuck Yaeger; I read books by Len Deighton on the air raids during WWII to learn English; and I am thrilled watching air shows.
Nowadays, my ambition is to take pictures out of the windows of planes. Did you ever paint airplanes in motion?
Steve,
We share our love of textures. Not surprisingly, I was thinking of you as I selected the first photo.
Hanneke warned me that many of us may not remember childhood influences with respect to our art. Perhaps, you now like what you missed back then.
Sunil,
I remember crying with joy when, as a teenager, I saw an exhibition of paintings of colorful Italian mountainsides in a museum in Hamburg. Germany in those days was fond of drab colors. I love colors too. This summer, I am dressed in orange and red.
June,
I have a sense of where you grew up from driving from NYC to Michigan.
I understand about the difference of where you live and what you love. When I admired Richard Estes’s shades of grey, I worked and lived on the lush Long Island Northshore. Now, in Michigan, I escape from all that green leafy stuff around our house into the desert-like sand dunes. We also share our love to be able to look a long way.
Birgit:
They wouldn’t sit still.
Had a couple of French curves as a kid and they ended up flat from overuse as I drew an endless succession of imaginary airplanes. Was it the air base? As far as lining up a Mitchell or the odd f-86, I drew them not. They were great roaring apparitions as they coursed through the sky and far less interesting on the ground.
I believe that Mr. Palmer has an atmospheric series of planes in and out of LAX.
Birgit:
There’s a spot outside of State College, Pa. where the view extends for eighty miles.
I attribute my own excitement in response to great distances to something called “savanna sense”. Postulating that our apy ancestors acquired a keen sense of the sward and an avid regard for its distant contents as a means to better survive. I scan with the remnant expectation of an approaching raptor and the rapture of knowing that such a danger is remote. I scan, therefore I am.
Jay,
I scan, therefore, I am
Yesterday, scanning across country from the tower of a castle, I fantasized an approaching horde. The sacking of the castle in 1425 must have fueled my imagination.
Birgit,
I love that first photo. There can be a lot of color in grey – it has to do with the contrast of textures you found.
I don’t have time to write much, but I know when I go to a completely different landscape from where I was a child, I am very aware of it. Driving out west (and then living out there) was somewhat shocking to my system- esp Montana, Idaho, Eastern Washington – the big open sky, the hugeness of everything, compared to my constant canopy of trees I was used to in Maryland. I imagine all travel makes you more aware of where you originated by sheer contrast.
And how that relates to my taste in art? Not sure, except I have always had trouble resolving big open spaces in my own work – I much prefer space filled with lots of little stuff…
“Neither Out Far Nor In Deep”
by Robert Frost
The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be––
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
Martha,
Thank you for introducing me to Robert Frost.