I took a series of photos of the sky over a period of about three months quite some time ago and I hope to return to the subject again one day.  I would love to see these printed large and on a wall for people to get lost in.

How many of us look to the sky for a message of some sort?  Happy Solstice.

The photos of “texture” on the group site were close-ups, both of quilted fabric and of objects that showed as textured. I started through my photos and quickly realized that deciding on what shows texture is not as easy as might be imagined. Here are some possibilities from my files.

The High Note, JOU, Computer images on Silk, quilted, 12 x 12″, 2008.

The upper layer (of computer-printed sheer fabric) is turned back to show under layer. Normally the sheer would fall over the entire piece, showing through as it does on the right bottom. This dropping of the sheer obscures much of the texture while at the same time, contradictorily, adds to it.

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Sunbeam (and various other titles), 1900, oil on canvas.

I was thinking of writing this post on Hammershoi, so I had lots of photos of his work easily accessible. He’s Danish, died at age 52 in 1916, was in Paris while the Impressionists were impressing people (he wasn’t, impressed, I mean), and shocked his contemporaries by not making paintings with stories, content, mytholgies, or “meaning.” Of course, we’ve added all those to his paintings since then.

Photo, Main Street in January, Portland Oregon, 2009

More often than not, we see texture, even if we know the thing we are looking at is flat, like those tree tops that look soft.

Vilhelm Hammershoi,Gentoft Lake, 1905, oil

Hammershoi’s techniques included using paint thinly, in layers, ala Vermeer. His work is near-abstract, although the images are clearly identifiable. He has been highly touted because of the flatness of his images, although his late paintings of city buildings in London have been less than positively reviewed — mostly, I suspect, because they use perspective so classically. But in the Gentoft Lake image the water has great texture, as do the doors in Sunbeam.

Charley Bierly, Little Pine Creek in Snow, photo, about 2005

JOU Little Pine in Snow, oil on board, 2008.

So texture isn’t just a matter of medium (as seen in the quilted piece, The High Note) or a kind of technique (as in my version of Little Pine Creek). It, like most art, is a matter of illusion. Even though we know the tips of the trees would lash rather than soothe and the hills are solid and stony, they still look soft.

Photo of Vilhelm Hammershoi’s parents home in Copenhagen (portrait above piano is by Hammershoi, of his sister, who is most likely the pianist, also)

Vilhelm Hammershoi, Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30, 1901

Hammershoi gives us clear texture in the table cloth, the woman’s hair, even the butter (which has more goosh to it than can be seen in this internet version).

I’m still maundering about the question of texture in photos (and, necessarily, on the internet.) Shadows, hue changes, and recognition of objects seem to be the most immediate elements that cause us to “see” texture. More often than not, we see texture in almost all representational images, even if we know the real thing (the computer screen, the photograph, the painting) to be flat or relatively thus. Only in true abstraction is texture sometimes obliterated.

Clement Greenberg and the abstract expressionists knew that flatness was an essential of painted art. Greenberg said, ” The essence of Modernism lies… in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself… What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general but also in in each particular art.” ( Modernist Painting, 1961 ) He also said, “It has been established by now, it would seem, that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness (After Abstract Expressionism, 1962).

We have come a long way from the ab exes and C.G., but we also, because of media explosions, see more and more in 2-dimensional imagery in which we insert our own sense of texture.

So I still haven’t resolved in my own mind what I should be looking for when I’m thinking about photographs of art that contain “texture.” Anybody have a brilliant (or even a generally interesting) thought on the subject?

PS: For more about Vilhelm Hammershoi, see also the Ragged Cloth Cafe recent post.

One thing I realized in the course of the recent Morandi discussions is that the edges of the bodies are often blurred, or more generally obscured, either through intervening snow or grass…

or motion blur…

If it’s not that, then a conventional sense of wholeness tends to be defeated by awkward angles…

or isolated details…

Strangely enough, I somehow feel that through these various obscurations I’m actually trying to understand basic horse form. Perhaps it’s that it seems too easy when handed to you in an immediately graspable way. I need to synthesize a horse from the disparate parts and peculiar views to appreciate it. It sort of makes sense to me when I put it like that, though I have my doubts as to whether other viewers would see it the same way. And it doesn’t seem to be a statement yet.

In thinking about this project, I may be aiming for something too neat and too intellectual. What I need fundamentally is a basis for editing decisions. I have so many images, I could easily mount a show limited to Eye of the Horse. When you are editing for an exhibit or portfolio submission, is simply liking an image enough to justify inclusion?

I managed to remember to photograph the first painting twice — once as it emerged from the garage session, and then again after I had been through the critique and had tweaked it in the studio. I didn’t do a lot to this  painting in my second go-round, but when I finished I was concerned about the loss of some of the “naive” quality of the red building. Here are images of the two versions:

Library Parking Garage, View South (first draft) 12 x 16, oil on board

Library Parking Garage, South View (draft 2), etc.

The differences between the two are slight, but the concern expressed by one member of the crit group was about the wonky perspective on the red building. I later mucked about with that building (as well as darkening the edge of the roofline the takes up much of the bottom of the painting  and which will get more work). I’m not sure the red building, as it now stands, is what I want. Another person suggested perhaps making all the buildings more wonky, which I didn’t have time for, but would still consider.

This series of decisions (as well as a rather funny comment by a fellow critiquer)  is what made my ears perk up when I read the Schiller quote. Is the first wonky take more “naive” in Schiller’s sense, than the second, somewhat less wonky, version? The comment from my fellow painter (who actually defended the wonky perspective) was something like “I’d like to be behind your eyes, seeing what you see when you drive down the street.”

The second painting references the Morandi/edge discussion and is a continuation of my visual wandering around the constructs of edges. I don’t have a photograph of the original post-garage painting, but the photo below is of the painting after I worked it a bit prior to the critique session. My hasty working was to try to eliminate the edge that runs down the slab of building in the center of the painting. My intent was to push that building out of the way of the steeple and crane, both of which were central to what I was seeing.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 1) 12 x 16, oil on board

After the critique, I modified the edge treatment of the slab, as well as pushing back, through losing the edges, the church roof and the foreground building edging. I also added shadows and changed hues a bit — the result is shown in the image below.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 2)

This last version, below, now sits in my studio, awaiting further revelations; I have made the slab more colorful and attempted to mirror somewhat the big block of sky on the other side. I also modified some of the color in the bottom righthand building.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 4)

So to recap: In the first version, which is close to what the original looked like,  I tried losing the edge of the big building on the right. Then I went to the critique meeting, where the lost edges were seen as too lost but also some of the other edges as too defined; so I added the lighter strip down the side of the big frontal slab and muckled about with the edges of the other buildings. Further emendations included changing some of the color, sharpening the steeple and church elements, and attempts at making the slab wall on the right echo something of the sky on the left.

I’m still debating about reinforcing that edge and wondering what it is that losing or finding or almost finding an edge means to the painting as a whole. What I was thinking of while I was painting was the sharpness of the steeple and the crane and the losing any impact of the slab, in spite of its size on the canvas (and in my view). That’s what happens in cities — people no longer see the altered, mangled buildings that sometimes inject themselves into photographs. But why did Morandi lose his edges as he does — is it the sense of oneness of all things, the lack of object individuality that he’s concentrating on? And then he delineates a very strong contour line on the opposite side of his lost edge, so he not only finds the other edges but thrusts it at us. Somewhat like that crane thrusts itself…..

OK, I’m through meandering. Please comment willy-nilly as you will. And I’m interested in why one loses or finds or sharpens or softens edges — not as a matter of aesthetics or realism, if you will, but as a matter of intent and philosophy.

To my right as I sip my morning coffee, are some other paintings, Numen and Heart, both 30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas:

To the left is a window that often acts as a painting:

Far left, on a slight diagonal wall over the fireplace, is another painting, the Mascall Formation Overlook, 18 x 36″, oil on canvas.

What all of these have in common is that I look and live with them daily. And, for the most part, they are my own creation (out of modesty, I don’t claim to have created either the flowers nor the foliage outside the window).

Looking and living with your own creations leaves you few excuses for bad work. There they are, the paintings you did or the flowers you arranged or the foliage you planted, staring back at you, day after day. It’s a wonderful, merciless experience and grand for teaching one about one’s art.

The questions I ask myself, over time, are as follows: Why did I like this art when I first put it on the wall? What does it do to the room? What do I look at most often within it? Do I like this art a week later? A month later?  Six months (if it lasts that long) later? Do I even “see” it after it hangs for a while or does it just disappear from consciousness? What will be done with it when I take it down — stored, destroyed, sold, revamped, revisited, reviled?  Are there better works to be done, inspired by this one? Do I ever want to do anything like this again?

Naturally the piece immediately in front of my coffee-drinking face is the one that garners the most attention. It gets the most criticism. And sometimes gets most extensively redone. Or taken down and put into deep storage. Often I move the ones from the sides to the front, in order to better assess what they are like when they are “in my face.” But sometimes, even on as they hang to one side, I can suss out the necessary info.

For the last six or so months, I had a 5 x 9 foot textile piece hanging on the right wall: Goose Rock, 48 x 108″, painted cotton, backed and batted with cotton, machine stitched.

By the time I took Goose Rock down, I was seriously annoyed with it. Right now it’s stored, but shortly it will either be cut into three pieces, almost equal in size, and/or given the “needle” treatment — that is, much more heavily quilted. It may even go back to the studio and get painted on more, probably after I’ve done more stitching over the top. Or maybe I will cut it into 3 unequal pieces and then cut the worst-composed one into more pieces and do something with all three thereafter to make it stop annoying me!

There’s also a kind of monotony to the piece that I’m not sure what I can do about. The effect of such a large wall covering is like that of tapestry — but tapestry tends to be multiplicitous in its imagery — or sometimes, like abstract art and color field painting, large swatches of subtle color. This representational kind of work might simply not be right for the large wall hanging. Or it might be that the wall on which it hung was not right for the work.

As you can tell, I’m still thinking about what needs doing to the piece that no longer pleases my eye and my visceral reactions (ie my gut). Next I’ll probably move one of the right side paintings to the front, so I can give it an equal share of criticism.

What art do you have hanging around that you think of changing — or keeping in exactly the same place forever? Does anyone else use their favorite sitting room as a critique gallery? Do you frame and hang your photographs and art? Do you keep bins of not-quite-discarded materials from which you may someday rescue them? How do you critique your own work and what do you do with it once you’ve come to some kind of semi-conclusion?

Birgit’s post and subsequent discussion on Giorgio Morandi has inspired me to try my hand at the same subject using photography. Not with the goal of trying to create an imitation Morandi, but more as an exploration for myself of some of the same ideas I see and enjoy in his paintings. I don’t claim these are necessarily Morandi’s ideas, but I think the process will certainly help me understand his work better. Essentially, I am taking up again the concept of studio as laboratory.

Here I present my first attempt, having had so far just a half-hour stolen from Thanksgiving activities yesterday. I grabbed a few bottles lying about and cleared off a table, though I didn’t manage to set up a simple background (hence the crop to remove distracting elements). I was primarily interested in playing with elusive boundaries. In the arrangement I photographed, the two blue bottles on the left merge (can you tell which is in front?), and the green bottle on the right merges with both the olive oil-filled bottle and the dark part of the background.  (The degree to which these remain slightly distinguishable will depend on your monitor settings; on my laptop, it depends quite noticeably on angle of view.)

One of the fun aspects of this micro-project was working with the color in relatively large patches. In this set-up, the colors were relatively dark compared with Morandi’s. Like his, they are partially de-saturated. This is a combination I happen to like, but I definitely want to try lighter colors also. Another aspect I enjoyed was the highlights and refracted lights, the simultaneous reflectivity and transparency. This is absent from Morandi’s work; he painted his bottles before painting the pictures, I presume to avoid these higher contrasts, as well as to provide the colors he wanted.

I photographed from a similar viewpoint as Morandi’s, well above the level of the table. The physical optics then dictated that the edges of the bottles were not parallel to the edges of the image, appearing to lean outward. I corrected this digitally to get the same distortion that Morandi preferred, whether intuitively or deliberately. I hadn’t been consciously aware of this earlier when looking at Morandi’s paintings, but I think it may contribute to the sense of “naive” simplicity that I get from his work.

As the title implies, I’m hoping to continue with this series. I’ve removed labels from a few more bottles, and am looking around for boxes or similar objects to add. Do you have any suggestions, or experiments to propose for this laboratory?

The book is Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting by Richard Schmid ($50 USD in soft cover from him; more from Amazon and more in hard cover).

Schmid begins his chapter by saying “Think about edges the way you would think about kissing someone…. Think of edges as exquisite subtleties, as the means to transmit romance, as ways to make your dabs or paint whisper or shout and reach nuances beyond the range of color. Think of them as visual poetry… but especially think of edges as you would the agents of expression in music….pianissimo (very soft), andante (flowing), allegro vivace (fast and lively), maestoso (majestic), fortissimo con sforzando (whamo!).

He’s speaking of edges that create an illusion (emphasis is Schmid’s) of how we ordinarily see, and some of what he says is quite common knowledge — that atmosphere, particularly at a distance, softens and cools elements, and hence edges. And so forth.

But the two aids to seeing edges, he says, are “Squinting and Comparison — [the same] that I [Schmid] described in the … chapter on values. They are essential in working with edges and you must do them together.

So today I was out painting Alla Prima (or plein air, if you are a francophile, or in the rain if you are a realist), and I forgot entirely about edges. But the conditions were just right for comparisons. I thought I’d swing through today’s efforts (remember, I’m a studio fixer-upper of paintings, so these are wet drafts) and think about edges and comparisons — and if that isn’t enough, go on to look at one of Schmid’s examples.

It being October 31, the rains have started, and it was pouring when we left the house. We went down to the river, where Interstate 5 runs along and above it. We sat beneath the interstate to stay out of the rain. Each of these paintings were about an hour’s worth of work: the one above is Hawthorne Bridge, Rainy Day, 12 x 16″, oil on board.

Later that day, in honor of the Trick-or-Treaters, the sun came out.

I moved my easel out into the sun where it was warmer and brighter, and painted for another hour. This isn’t exactly the same scene (duh!) but it’s the same bridge and river and some of the same buildings.

Hawthorne Bridge after Rain, 12 x 16, oil on board

Obviously the rainy one features cool blues; the colors warm up considerably when the sun came out (as did the painter). But the edges changed too. In the earlier painting, the mist in the air blanked out the west hills, behind the city. I smudged them in at the last moment, but they are still without much interest. When the sun came out, the hills were still wet and a bit misty, but the fall colors were oozing through and the hills in the painting become far more alive.

The edges of the hills in the rain painting are faked; the form is just stuck there (I hadn’t had lunch yet). But in the second painting, the edges and the sky intertwine and it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other ends — which was as it was. Here are a couple of close-cropped details of each:

On th other hand, I think I got the edges of the bridge in the rain more “authentically” than the one in the sun, where again, it was at the end of the session.  I needed to make sure the bridge was there, so I slashed a line of paint that doesn’t catch the sun on the edges — I think a change of hue as well as value is required.

This is but a beginning in this venture of edges. I did think about the buildings and how their edges should be painted, but I haven’t sussed out yet quite the degree of sharpness in varying conditions and so I tend to just throw up a line that tells us all that that’s a building edge. But I’m aware of the challenge, so maybe I’ll get to the process in due time.

I will attempt to get at these edges before the paint dries — Schmid warns about the difficulties of mooshing edges after the oil is dry to the touch — but looking at the raw version is illuminating.

Here’s a Richard Schmid — not the one from the book, but something similar:

Schmid’s oils often resemble watercolors — not my style. But his ability to analyze the whys and wherefores of certain processes, and his sense of humor, are well worth feeling a bit inadequate in the face of his work.

And how are your edges doing these days? By the way, I started this post thinking about squinting and comparisons, but the comparisons I made here aren’t what Schmid is speaking of — he means comparing the values and edges at the real site, squinting to make out what the strongest ones are and where they disappear. He also warns against squinting at the canvas. He even has a whole page on the practice of squinting. “Lastly” he says, “it only works marginally when working with photographs. SQuinting at a photo is about the same as squinting at a painting. Everything gets fuzzy. Squinting for values in a photo is sometimes useful, but because of the limited data caught by the camera, the information you can obtain is minimal compared to squinting at the real thing.”

I wanted to show him Steve’s photos!