Title: Peace of Mind
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 101×76 cm

Emily Carr, Cedar Sanctuary, 38 x 26″, Oil on paper, 1942

I’ve learned a lot through this exercise [ including the rule that I must paint-over or otherwise destroy the copies I've made before someone comes into the studio and exclaims with pleasure over them. Such an exclamation forces me to admit that what the complimenter is seeing is a copy, causing embarassment all round.] Carr’s finding of shapes in the complexity, of making color within the shapes, and of “draping” her branches are all valuable for my own art-making thoughts.

However, during this process, I had other kinds of questions occur.

I claim to be a painter of places. These are very specific places, although I can lump them into categories: wonky city-and-hamlet scapes, tree-scapes, desert-scapes, genteel fields-and-tree landscapes. But I really think of them as moments in time, when a particular place at a particular time catches me at a particular place and particular time and we interact.

My painting is not about the picture plane of the canvas, although it obviously deals with that. It’s not about technique although I’m studying hard Carr’s technique. It’s not about color or shape or concept. It’s not even about me, although I occupy some corner of its being. It’s about place/space and my sense of the place/space interlaced with one single moment in time. What I hope to evoke for others is a sense of a particular place, time, and vision.

Underwood, The High Note, Basin, Montana, Oil on canvas, about 20 x 20, 2008

The question that this brings up is fairly fundamental. It has to do with a notion about style or “voice” — the idea that a mature artist has evolved a particular style that is recognizable over a range of subjects. An artist’s voice is what collectors look for, what curators need for exhibits. It’s part and parcel of an American sense of self, individualized, particularized, not like anyone else but instantly identifiable. In that sense, finding one’s voice is all about “me.”

Of course, the general construct of style turns out to be flexible. You only have to think about the changes in styles of dress or changes in ways of behavior when you move from place to place, even in the homogenous USA. When I was in Kansas, I almost never wore blue jeans. In Wyoming and Oregon, I almost never wear anything else. The time you arrive for dinner is highly dependent upon whether you were in New York City, Laramie Wyoming, Slate Run, Pennsylvania, or Portland Oregon. And if you have friends from different places, sometimes it’s best to spell out what “casual” means on the invites.

So is it likely that an artist interested in place would have the same style when addressing the gentle breezes and pleasant sunniness of the Willamette Valley as when painting the February space of the Nevada desert?

Underwood, Oak Island on Sauvies‘, 18 x 24″, Oil on board, 2009

Underwood, Amargosa Playa 3, Oil on board, 18 x 24″, 2009

Or when the remnants of the once rain forest loom overhead on an unprecedentedly hot day in an urban park:

Underwood, Cedars, Mt. Tabor Park, 18 x 24, Oil on board, 2009

Or in the studio, painting a composite of experiences garnered while painting plein air on downtown streets?

Underwood, Circling Traffic, Oil on canvas, about 30 x 36″ 2008

I’m not sure there is an answer to the question of whether an artist’s style should (or will) override or absolutely inform her sense of place, particularly if a sense of immediate place, time, and self is her primary concern. I’m aware that certain elements of the way I paint may appear regardless of the place and time. I’m also aware that while I may be a mature woman, it might be said that I am not a mature painter. Or even that our notions of “maturity” in painting is determined by the ways paintings are given to us — edited to make particular points in books and exhibits,  so the art appears consistent throughout when, in actuality, in the painter’s studio, it was far more varied and chaotic. So perhaps the question is a moot one.

But it was brought to me in an immediate way when I moved from  copying Emily Carr (brought on by a week of painting trees in an a very “treed” urban park) to a painting I’ve been working on since March, when I was in the Nevada desert. Here’s the desert painting as it appeared prior to copying Carr:

Underwood, The Amargosa Playa 2, draft 2, oil on canvas, about 48 x 50, oil on canvas, 2009

And here it is after Carr:

Underwood, The Amargosa Playa 2, draft 5, still unfinished, about 48 x 50, oil on canvas, 2009

And here’s a Carr painting with some of the technical aspects that this desert Amargosa Playa 2 is playing with:

Emily Carr Rushing Sea of Undergrowth, 1932-’35, Oil on canvas, 44 x 27″

I originally thought this post was to be about the Sublime, that concept that A&P gave me insights into a few years back, when it was the topic of some excellent posts (I couldn’t find the posts to refer back to those posts but I remember being impressed by them). I think that Carr’s forests — and my sense of the forest and the desert — is close to Edmund Burke’s:

Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is “dark, uncertain, and confused.” While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.

(quoted from Wikipedia, The Sublime)

So I am transferring something of Carr’s techniques to my painting of the desert, but I’m timid about that sense of light and darkness as Burke describes it.

I’m not sure Carr’s technique and vision works with a desert painting. I’m not sure it should work. The Amargosa painting may now (or finally) work fine as a vision on the wall, but not as an evocation of time/place/me. And that’s what led me to my current question about style and voice: is it possible to evoke a sense of place and time with techniques from another place and time? Can a person channeling Emily Carr make any headway painting the desert? Anyone want to take a crack at this?

PS: More about the Sublime from Wikipedia:

In his Critique of Judgment (1790) , Kant investigates the sublime, stating “We call that sublime which is absolutely great”. He distinguishes between the “remarkable differences” of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty “is connected with the form of the object”, having “boundaries”, while the sublime “is to be found in a formless object”, represented by a “boundlessness”

In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation,

For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

• • Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).
  • Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).
  • Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).
  • Sublime – Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).
  • Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).
  • Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe’s extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer’s nothingness and oneness with Nature). All indented quotes from Wikipedia, “The Sublime.”

Uncondiotionally 2009

Tittle: Unconditionally
Size: 102×76 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

Don’t know if you all read on my web biography that recently I have embarked in a deep and personal spiritual journey that has opened a door to the ethereal world of Reiki and crystal healing.
Through meditation and welcoming my Spirit and Angels to guide me through my work I have learned to give Reiki to my paint tubes and canvases before I start a painting.
My intentions are to create more than just a painting, but share a healing experience through the vision of the Divine irradiating a sense of peace and love of nature.

I am not sure if you all seen the film ‘The Secret’ but there is a very interesting part about a Feng Shui consultant working with a painter and how his works become the reality in his life through the law of attraction.

What are your intentions in your creations? Are you attracting what you want into your life through your works? Are you really showing your world and the true inner self?
What do you really want to achieve?
Your true self is how you feel yourself when nobody’s watching. It is where your deepest thoughts live. It is what you ultimately think of yourself, how you treat yourself and what you fear others might see inside you. It is your most native and real personality, your true Spirit!

Once you change the way you feel about yourself and evoke it into your works, the law of attraction will change your life. You are the magnificent creator of your own reality!

Even if you don’t care greatly about Picasso, I recommend the Charlie Rose interview with Françoise Gilot, who lived ten years with the man. A talented artist herself, and very independent-minded, Gilot frequently discussed art with Picasso. Much of what he said about how he worked has come to us through her. For example, regarding the rather complex, high cubist paintings, he said than in the “early stages” there were almost no “references to natural forms…I painted them in afterwards.” Braque had a similar working procedure. Rather than abstract from an initial representation of a scene, these cubists–at least for a time as their approach evolved–roughly laid out their abstract, faceted spaces and forms, then filled in enough clues to suggest the subject. Those clues could appear in rather disconnected spots. I believe it was the dealer Kahnweiler who said they had developed a way to free objects, showing that they existed without showing where they were located.

Picasso was first introduced to Gilot in 1943, when he begged an introduction from an actor friend, who was sitting nearby at a restaurant with Gilot and another painter. I’ve seen it told several places that Picasso approached their table carrying a bowl of cherries, but Gilot mentions that he also left with them! After they began living together in 1946, Picasso painted a series of portraits of Gilot entitled Femme-fleur (loosely, Flower woman), shown here in order. With their hair transformed into a leaf canopy, they have an intriguing relationship to a well-known 1948 Robert Capa photo of the two at the beach.

Elsewhere on the Picasso front, I’ve started listening to TJ Clark’s Mellon Lectures as podcast from the National Gallery of Art (thanks to Namaste Nancy for the reminder). He’s a wonderful and detailed reader of paintings. But in an odd moment near the beginning, he appeared needlessly and overly scornful of those interested in the artist’s biography. No doubt, in the case of Picasso, there’s much third-hand gossip, and I suspect a good deal of what’s been written about his life would be worth reading. Nevertheless, he’s a fascinating and powerful character, fun to learn about even if I didn’t feel I was gaining some insight into his art.

I see the importance of being able to deal with an artwork in its own terms. But it seems not only limiting, but self-deceptive to claim that external knowledge is irrelevant. (I hasten to say that Clark himself does not make such an extreme claim, though he appears to have some distaste for personal history, despite frequently citing Gilot as a source.) Could we learn from art anything about ourselves, others, and the world, if those things were not involved in the work?

Do you have an interest in the personal histories of artists you care about? Or do you prefer to experience the art from a more “purist” perspective?

Running Free by Angela Ferreira

Title: Running Free
Size: 102×127 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

“This matters; this has purpose” and “I can do this, I am able, I can carry out this task to its appropriate end” (correspondence from Joachim B. Lyon, Stanford, California, New Yorker, May 4, 2009).

I found these notions both bemusing and contra-indicated. What do you think?

(Oh, and here’s an image from Rhyolite Nevada ghost town. I don’t know if it has either purpose or, if I paint it, as I intend to do, if I am adequate to the chore.)

Tittle: Rebirth Net
Size: 76×61 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas