At the request (advice/direction) of my oil painting instructor, Jef Gunn, I have gone out on the streets of Portland to paint. Luckily the weather has been relatively decent, although cold if one is catching morning shadows. But the experience has put me in the midst of the community, and a grand experience it has been.
I am discovering that one of the most fulfilling aspects of painting is having the casual onlooker weigh in, discuss the weather, make silly comments or just say “hi.” I didn’t realize until the Basin experience how much having a bit of interaction with the community could mean to me. The Portland pleine aire work that I’ve been doing verifies that social contact enhances the pleasures for me of slapping color on board, smooshing substances around until they come to mean something, and personal ruminations about the view.
A recent article in the Oregonian’s In Portland section featured artist Benjamin Alexander Clark, “guerilla painter’ who seems also to thrive on community.
Clark, 37 years old, lives in a house jammed with art, including a framed hole in the ceiling. He’s a carpenter by day and a mosly portrait painter by night; each painting, he says, has a story. He has worked as guest artist at P:ear, a nonprofit for 15 -to 23 year old lost souls. He paints the clients and when a painting sells, he pays the subjects a modeling fee. He also donates paintings to the Cascade Aids Project, Children’s Heart Foundation and Project Quest. He paints in oils and acrylics on reclaimed objects like doors and tabletops. His work is often sentimental, but at its best, the reviewer said, he grasps essentials about his subjects.
“‘When I’m painting, the art is totally between me and God,’ he says (rolling a cigarette), ‘As soon as its done, it’s a commodity . It’s for sale or I give it away. The art is over for me.'” When the house gets to full, he distributes the art — giving it to friend, donating it, or installing what’s left around the city.. He puts his art on power poles, on a wall plastered with fliers, and hands it over to homeless people. Sometimes he rubber stamps his paintings: “this is not art.” He’s willing to sell his art, but also shows in off-beat galleries. Sometimes the art gets beat up by the weather; more often it disappears, along with the folks who have received it. Sometimes Clark re-paints the weather beaten pieces and re-establishes them
Along the way, it’s clear that Clark takes possession of the city by giving it his work. He establishes contacts, jives with the locals, chats up the dear old ones, and simply engages whatever drifts into his path. He’s a psychogeographer whose work and placement are linked to the geography by chance, by the accident of his finding and the incidents of his painting.
This sounds to me like my kind of fun. Today I met the owner of a house that I’ve loved since about 1995. It’s a pink and green cottage on a commercial boulevard, holding out against the city’s desire to buy the property and build a community center.
I knew it when it had doll houses in its storefront, which now is the studio of its videophotographer owner (his wife did the doll houses). I’ve painted it twice and I’ll paint it again until I catch its stubborn whimsicality in the context of Morrison Street, a heavily traveled primary boulevard through the residential Buckman district.
I also painted the bar diagonally across the street from the pink house. I was told by a voyeur that my painting of the bar was “sweet.” That makes me need to go back and capture something of its archeaological grittiness, its past when it was the Morrison Street Tavern and reeked of stale beer and cigarette smoke and left its doors open so I could look in at 10 AM and see the drinkers, nursing their hangovers. Now, the bar is called “Crush” and is a yuppified lesbian hangout, very much a power place, if not a power point. But I still smell the old ciggies when I walk by.
I’ve been congratulated on painting in the streets, observed sideways by the workers at the local soup kitchen and emergency services center, and laughed at for tryng to make the residential “traffic calmers” (roundabouts) into objects of aesthetic interest. I froze my fingers, greeted any number of down-and-outers, am learning the subtle differences in neighborhood denizens, and in short, am becoming, because I’m plunked down for a couple of hours in front of an easel on a sidewalk or piece of grass, a psychogeographer.
I also found Mary Scriver’s comments about Power Points on Steve’s recent Art Walk post intriguing: Power points as Mary describes them — “the basic set: the highest, the lowest, the entrance, the crossing, the edge of water or a change in vegetation or terrain, transition points, fork in a path.”
I think I’m stubbornly ignoring “power places.” I want the place to be “chosen” by “drift,” by whether I’m too tired to walk further or the scene is blocked by a car or today a skyscraper feels like it would be fun to paint or the dog walks in front of my studio window. I don’t choose my elements by the composition they make — I choose them because of some chance, yet felt, interaction between the scene and myself. Then I have to find a composition that matches the interaction, however awkward or unpretty. In that sense, I suppose that I am trying to make visible the interaction between the scene and myself, rather than making an object that qua object.
Which then brings up the perennial question: for what audience or purpose does the psychogeographer engage — herself? –the neighborhood? –the world that needs to see that artists don’t necessarily have to travel in metal containers to wide vistas to make art? –Some conception of what art should be? –Or just for the heck of it, drifting along until a brush (or camera) appears in one’s hand and a vista opens up and a fine interesting face calls out for recording? Clark paints for himself — and then discharges his duty to the universe by giving it up. I paint to understand what I am confronted with — and I haven’t yet decided on how to discharge my duty to the universe. But I did put a painting outside where it could be snatched up by a local burglar. Thus far no one has taken me up on my offering.
June,
It sounds like fun interactions with locals, which I think would be great if you’re open to it. I can imagine it would be distracting for some painters, but they may not be the ones who would paint those scenes, anyway. I like the idea that you’re learning about your subject — the place — through more channels than just your visual observation.
On the question of who the psychogeography is for, I have to admit that I’m quite selfishly thinking of myself as I plan the fairly structured project I’ve been contemplating. (Though it’s fair to say that, as a landscape photographer, almost all my work has at least some psychogeographical component.) I’m hoping to get a better handle on both how I choose the sorts of photographs I “normally” make, and what happens when force myself to think in larger, geographical terms, and to make photographs where I otherwise wouldn’t. I also want to see what, if anything, is added by trying to record aspects of the experience in writing as well as in images.
If you were still in Basin, I might drive over to adopt/steal your painting, but Portland is a little too far…
Ah, come on to Portland, Steve — you Montanaans drive this far just to see what’s over the hill.
Seriously, you and Kate have an open invitation, any time your 15 degree weather disagrees with you. Today it was 60 here, although you had to look hard to see the sun.
I think we might each have our own reasons for sauntering through a landscape; I’m having fun with Portlanders who say, “where did you say that bar was, anyway?”
June,
I like the way that you are gently abstracting your town, learning to do it in a fluid sort of way.
Birgit,
Your phrase “abstracting your town” is puzzling to me, mostly because I don’t think I’m exactly “abstracting” — that is, I’m not boiling down the elements to their essences, nor selecting the single most important aspects of the scene. And these are not abstractions in the classic art sense of the word.
I think what I”m trying to do is to take a cock-eyed view of my environment (cocking my own personal eye, of course) and representing it. It’s very like what I said about the Basin Refuge piece; it didn’t depict Basin, Montana, or even “Basin” Montana, but rather some interface between what was out there and what was interior to me.
The reason I’m going on in this tedious way about my intentions is that I was inarticulate in the critique session the other night and I’m determined not to get caught again with my words all flurried and meltable. I am not painting for the sake of the object that results, the quirky or beautiful or sensitive or meaningful object, but rather painting in order to make visible the interface between myself and the external environment. That interface is often not the expected result, either as art or as essence.
June,
Exactly, you are not ‘boiling it down’. I said gently abstracting it. I don’t see people, cars, waste baskets or trash lying in the street.
Sorry, having so far escaped formal art training, I still (?)feel free to use my words as they appeal to me.
Isn’t anything that we do expressing what is ‘interior in us’?
June:
allow me to repeat my stock truism that art is the world expressed through a personality – or words to that effect. I can see you raising a mental finger, ready to introduce one or more of the many points that such a simplistic statement raises in the face of the complexities that we encounter when dealing with the subject. But I think my little adopted aphorism is more than usually apropos with your work. Except for some of the early textiles of yours that I have seen, your work doesn’t tend to adhere much to accepted norms as expressed in the art media. Your eye doesn’t seem to be cocked toward the achievements of others, so as to benefit from copying. June, the self-aware entity, goes out and wrestles with what she sees – and maybe wrestles with herself and her materials while seeing it. And it’s usually something much bigger than herself. I can’t say that I always “see” what your getting at, but I know that I’m looking at something very personal and hard won.
This may not be easy for you to answer, but can you outline the sequence of actions that lead to a given image? Do you set up a palette ahead of time, or squeeze it out as the spirit moves you? Do you tend to set up where a car won’t run over you, or do you carefully scout out a subject that would make a good photo if you weren’t going to paint it? For example, some of your paintings lock horns with an awkward aspect- a long foreground road for example, or a big lawn – while your photographs are differently composed. I realize that sitting at an easel can be a separate dynamic from pointing a camera, and the results can diverge accordingly. But then again, the very un-photographic manner of your painting may be consciously decided.
A quick comment about “abstract”. I believe that a harm was done when the term was adopted as descriptive of certain tendencies in art. To me every work of art is the product of a culling process. We survive by simplifying as the world presents more variables than the mind can comprehend, and when we spit it back out in clay or on a canvas it is simplified even more. So every description that we venture is a form of abstraction.
Birgit,
I did appreciate your term “gently.” although there isn’t a lot of trash in my area of the city. I have left out, for example, the tangle of wires that are part of every scene I paint around here — a tangle that definitely interferes with the overview of the scenery.
I don’t think you misused “abstract” at all, and so you mustn’t belittle your own understanding of the word. What I was trying to explain (to myself as much as to others) is why my paintings look so different from all the others done by my very fine colleagues in the painting class. I think for me, my verbalizations are in part a way not to get sucked into the attractions of the beauty that I so love in the work of the others.
And you and Jay are right about all art coming from the artist — there’s no escaping that. But the artist’s intentions, the intentionality worked into the paint, may be different. I think my fellow artists (in the class that I’m in) intend to make an art object. And they manage very well. When they abstract, they do so so the formal elements work well, so the impact of the paint is powerful, so the canvas takes up space in its own right. My intentions are different, I think, so I don’t choose the “best” viewpoint (more on that in a bit, when I respond to Jay). I don’t simplify to make the best composition (although I’m not against a good composition) but only to make my intention, the elaboration of the interface, more evident.
I didn’t mean to sound like I was criticizing you — I wasn’t. I was just trying to sort out why I’m not emulating what I’m in such enormous admiration of.
Jay,
As I said, you and Birgit are quite right in your thinking that art comes from the artist — that can’t be escaped (I return to Fritz Perls’ “all the characters in your dreams are you”); and you are also right to say that the meaning of the word “abstract” gets distorted when it’s applied to a style. I stand corrected if I misspoke myself or explained myself poorly.
“Wrestling” is an accurate term for what I seem to do through and with my art. It is the way I find most satisfaction in the work. I don’t want to succumb to the blandishments of conventionally lovely formats, not because they are distasteful or distort reality or are too sentimental, but because I fear my own sinking into the ordinary and the expected, ie I fear I won’t be able to resist being conventional.
I know myself well enough to know that I can get seduced by what is not appropriate; I can come to want to wear pink frills even when they make me look like an elephant in a tutu. I fear,in perhaps a better example, that if I paint the path through the dunes, the painting won’t have Birgit’s fine sense of mystery hovering just beyond sight; it will just look like an ok postcard of any old path through the dunes. So I go for the awkward and difficult because in some ways it prevents me from falling into banality; I sense a weakness for banality in myself, so I try to avoid situations where I would slide into it.
You also said, “This may not be easy for you to answer, but can you outline the sequence of actions that lead to a given image? Do you set up a palette ahead of time, or squeeze it out as the spirit moves you? Do you tend to set up where a car won’t run over you, or do you carefully scout out a subject that would make a good photo if you weren’t going to paint it? For example, some of your paintings lock horns with an awkward aspect- a long foreground road for example, or a big lawn – while your photographs are differently composed.”
Wow! I must have succeeded at something. I deliberately try for the view that comes closest to expressing my feeling for the scene, which has nothing to do with composition or the best place to photograph it or capturing just the right angle or even showing semi-realistically what is in sight.
It is true that I am a bit lazy and a bit leary of my urban surrounds, so I try not to set up where a car will run me down or a drunk will take umbrage at my lack of skill. But I also deliberately avoid the photographically excellent viewpoint; I often plunk down at random (in a safe, warm spot) and tell myself to paint what’s there, not what I wish was there or what I could make more elegant if I moved ten feet either way.
It’s the kind of challenge that I love — like painting traffic islands (“calmers”), which aren’t all that aesthetic this time of year and tend not to form very good compositions. Engaging in the difficult allows me more freedom. I can just take what’s in front of me and suss it out without having to deal with what it should mean or how it should look.
I sense that you work in this way too, with your love of material. “What if..” is a mantra that we both play with a lot — you with wood and metal and foam and me with whatever surrounds I find myself in. It’s why I think of myself as a Drifter in the Derive sense of the word; a flaneur in a city that is made for such activity.
Blah, I can feel that I’m still not making the sense I need to be able to make. I think I’ll go nap.
And oh yeah — I’ve _never_ set up a palette ahead of time. I had trouble understanding what you were talking about, until I remembered advice from various books about laying out all your paints before you begin so you aren’t interrupted by having to dig around for the sap green or burnt umber.
I don’t know what my palette will be until after I’ve started painting. For one thing, I “draw” with my brush, lightly dipped in mineral spirits. The drawings are in some not too loud color that probably will appear in the final painting in some form. But pinks will start as greens and oranges as purples; I’m not too fussy.
It might be inexperience that makes me not know until I get to it that that car will be red and that house pink. Perhaps next year I’ll be talking like the guys in the books about the importance of laying out the palette ahead of time. Hmmm, now there’s a challenge….
June,
Soon after the birth of A&P, we had an exciting conversation about about ‘criticizing’ and ‘critiquing’. Being ‘youthful’ rather than ‘young’, I am immune to ‘criticism’ and very much enjoy ‘critique’
From your ‘gentle’ description of it, I am beginning to understand what a 2008 painting class may be. (1) The teacher teaches to ‘abstract ‘ so that ‘the formal elements work. (2) There is competition to paint the superficially most compelling picture.
Please tell me more about the ‘elaboration’ of the interface.
I laughed reading about your concern of being ‘conventional’ and remembered you talking earlier about living in Scarsdale or so and wearing time-less, little black dresses. I had been afraid of boredom; are conventional and boring the same thing?
It is inspiring to learn, how the creator
of Mother-of-us-all, Eocene, Painted Hills Bluff is wrestling with a new medium to generate what is ‘usually something much bigger than herself’.
June:
I agree that you might wish to lock your paint box, lest the drunk take raw or burnt umber-age.
I want to continue our rap just as soon as I can disentangle myself this morning and finish staring at the blizzard outside.
June and Birgit:
We’ve got a passel of points to parse here.
As for the term “conventional” and “boring”, I read lately that boredom, as a phenomenon, may have biological underpinnings. Furthermore, some sage was quoted as saying that only boring people get bored, a controversial point, but a useful riposte to kids grousing in the back seat. “Conventional”, on the other hand goes all over the place. For me there’s nothing more conventional than those prints and paintings of waterfowl that one can see in waiting rooms across the land. It can take my mind off the impending procedure. etc. to closely examine these images, and, usually, there is some virtue therein that rewards the attention. But enough of the lecture, I can get bored stiff in a room full of Rembrandts.
June, I realized along the way that you had carefully explained in your post what I then asked you about in my comment – which you then patiently re-explained for my benefit. Iterative inquiry. It occurs in detention centers and, seemingly, in certain centers of my brain.
Attractiveness remains a mystery for me. Granted that the most attractive face is the most average, I can’t see how this applies very well to a street scene where averageness is rarely a factor. ( A statistically significant number of faces were photographed under uniform conditions. These were then morphed together into a single face representing a blend of all the faces. The blended face was generally chosen as the most attractive.) But we all move the image in the viewfinder around until we get the “best” composition. I know that, for me, it’s a feeling, a sudden urge to press the button. Sometimes it’s because some things line up, but in other cases it’s too complex to explain easily. I can’t explain it, so it’s a mystery. June, by setting aside this impulse, you force yourself to exercise other regions of your mind when confronting the motif and the attractiveness that appears in the product is generated from within. I think I better get another cup of coffee.
every description that we venture is a form of abstraction
Jay, I agree with this, but I don’t think that means the term abstraction isn’t useful. There is a very wide range in degree of departure from realistic representation, and placing an artist or a particular work on that continuum can say a lot about their approach in a compact way.
Growing up, I was surrounded by people who tried adhering to convention with masks on their faces, very boring to a child. Decades after I graduated from high school, I learned of the ‘scandalous’ news in my hometown that Fräulein Jäger, my German teacher, was discovered to be a Lesbian!
Steve:
The language suffers a shortage of synonyms for “abstraction”. The word serves a role wherever appropriated, but can lead to arguments, broken marriages and war when loosely applied. In art we deal with a lot of ad hoc nomenclature and maybe some parallel descriptive system, based upon a clear set of premises, is in order. I’ll check with Rudolph Arnheim to see what he might have.
Birgit,
While I was an adolescent, I was desperate to be just like everyone else — particularly the elses who were featured in Seventeen Magazine. I never even came close, but oh how I wanted it.
I fear that desire was imprinted on me in the usual perverse ways — now I am desperate to be unlike my fellow artists. Perversity, thy name may well be “Me.”
Jay, I am seldom bored — almost never. Irritated, hungry, hot, tired, grumpy, exhilarated, exasperated, wired, jumpy — but not bored. “Ever to be bored,” said the poet’s mother, “means you have no inner resources.” But I fear the line comes from a philistine — the main character in the poem, who seems to be the poet himself, is horribly bored — but not boring. I can’t remember who that poet is, just the line that I’ve recited to the backseat innumerable times.
And Jay, I think you read my work almost too well. Maybe I should decide on a palette ahead of time and see what that means to the paintings.
June:
A traffic island painted in the colors of a Premium saltine box.
There I was, an eleven year old kid, having been stuffed into a clean shirt and taken to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam to hear an oratorio. Wonderful place, wonderful music and me wonderously bored – boredom like a bad toothache.
I can remember Jer using those adjectives.
Jay,
They forgot to bribe you with candy?
On snowy winter weekends, I often took the kids to the Metropolitan Museum because one could park the car underneath. Always, our first stop was the cafeteria. With Karl, we then often ended up at the knights.
Birgit:
Truth be it’s a miracle that I have any semblance of a metabolism considering the amount of candy I consumed as a kid. This was especially true in Amsterdam where I was met with a whole new world of sweets.
June, you are painting (at least as long as you are in SE Portland) where I was the animal control officer from 1973 to 1978. When I look at your images, I see the ghosts of dogs I knew there. (Quite a few repeaters.) I was always very aware of the terrain under the streets: Mt. Tabor, the gulch with the golf course, and Laurelhurst Park which my family visited from the time I was able to stagger. One of the houses that always intrigued me was the one on Hawthorne where Linus Pauling lived. I don’t know whether geography and/or history affect where you decide to land or not. But I know for sure there are a lot of art-friendly people around there.
Prairie Mary
Mary, Prairie and dog, oh my!
The local zoo used to have a modest prairie dog town adjacent to the raptor exhibit: a cruel juxtaposition for all parties involved.
Oh my, Mary, you have my neighborhood, precisely, as well as my operative mode. Geography and history are so much a part of my psyche I forget that for some people they aren’t.
I don’t know where Linus Pauling lived (I’m two blocks from Hawthorne, so I’m a bit abashed.) But I belonged to an artists’ guild that used the Hawthorne house (around 45th st) belonging to Doc Severinson (or maybe it was his aunt….), And the old asylum site run by Dr. Hawthorne is just down the street. I’m going to paint the industrial buildings now sitting on the ground where the pond used the be at the foot of the hill. My daughter lives in south Mt Tabor, and they may have run the Metropolitan Area Express Light Rail up the Gulch (Sullivan’s) where the golf course of which you speak used to be.
And dogs — again, resonances: I posted on my adventures and painting in Basin Montana a while back, where the dogs were, I suspect, stand-ins for the people. It was the first time I ever painted dogs and it was definitely a learning experience.
http://www.artandperception.com/2008/02/the-refuge.html#more-1855
http://www.artandperception.com/2008/02/basin-montana-in-winter-a-celebration-of-place.html#more-1827
Thanks for checking in. Southeast Portland is changing a bit, but not so rapidly as downtown Portland, where the warehouse district has turned into a boutique, loft, and gallery haven called “The Pearl.” La-di-da!