The show is composed of interleaved groups of my photographs and Kerry’s prints. My contributions came from the Sourdough Trail project, the Cottonwoods series, and the Meeting Sky series, together with a newer set, unimaginatively called Windy Day. The latter consisted of the image above in a constellation with the following six, which are actually details of the same scene photographed at different moments.

These were strung out in a wavy line against the color-contrasting, warm brick. The large picture is 22″×13″, while the smaller ones are 9″×9″.

Windy Day set

Some of Kerry’s prints are quite large, and certainly dominate my photographs in terms of size. However, I don’t think the viewer’s experience is quite so lop-sided. What’s your impression?

Windy Day next to Anam Cara and Wilderness

Along Sourdough Trail (3 of 5) next to Tilt series

One of Kerry’s sets consisted of three grids of 9″×12″ prints sandwiched between layers of plexiglas, each depicting the same tree in front of a friend’s house, but (loosely) in morning, midday and evening light.

Composite prints by Kerry Corcoran

For this show I experimented with papers. My Windy Day and Meeting Sky sets were printed on tones (”white” and “cream”, the latter actually closer to pale peach) of a watercolor/printing paper (Stonehenge). This took some experimentation with inking profiles, and yielded less sharpness and contrast than normal photo printing paper, but that seemed appropriate. I also chose not to use glass in the rather minimalist frames, and even exposed the rough edges of the paper on two sides.

Framing with exposed deckle edge

The absence of glass not only made the paper more present, but avoided reflections, which I always find quite annoying. Hopefully the paper will stand up well, without warping significantly. It’s not so much of a risk with photographs—I can print a new one if need be.

Reflections on glass, not on paper

As I’m writing this, Birgit has posted a comment on our earlier discussions of dissolving boundaries in Giorgio Morandi’s paintings. Though not quite explicit, that idea was certainly in my head with the later work in this show. The complexity of the tree/sky boundary in Meeting Sky, with the densely ramified twigs, and the softness of it in Windy Day, with the motion blur, are two ways this idea can be approached in photography.

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?

Below are photographs of two of JF’s paintings, first F.W.F, 1976 (72 x 56″):

Fascinating to see geometry outlined by edges! The dazzling quality of the painting appears to be due to, quoting JF:

…I started sitting the bottles on mirrors, to bounce the light back up through them and intensify it. I’d paint the set-up all day long. If the light was terrific in the bottle at one moment, that’s when it was painted. I sort of set up a watch. And I’d look at things, and whatever was exciting that happened – in this situation where everything was always in flux – was recorded in the painting. The light is never in the same place for more than a second…

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Vincent Katz likens the ‘artificiality ‘ in lighting due to capturing highlights at different time points to the artificiality in Dutch still life where flowers that bloom at different times of the year nevertheless appear in the same painting.

The next picture is Orange Cloth/Orange Poppies, 2000 (48 x 60″):

Edges are still accentuated. And, I think in this painting, there may be some dissolving of boundaries due to similarity in color of different shapes.

Has anyone thought about Morandi and Fish at the same time?

So far, I have only seen Morandi’s paintings in real life. I will attempt to see Janet Fish’ Grey Day (1978) in my town at the Kresge Art Museum Collection, Michigan State University. Nancy thinks that the painting may be archived. Thus, I will have to put in a request for special viewing after I return from Germany. More later,

Happy New Year!

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.

Here is an excerpt showing the boundary between the  left aspect of the vessel and its background:

Looking at this excerpt here on the web shows a clear boundary between the vessel and the background. However, in the museum, standing back from this painting and viewing it from some distance made the boundary disappear. The left aspect of the vessel melted into the background. It was a fun experiment going close to the painting and then moving away while observing the boundary disappear, giving the impression that the top of the vessel was vertically cut in half.

GM finished this second painting before his death in 1964:

Here is its excerpt showing the left aspect of the vessel against the background:

This excerpt of the 1964 painting indicates the similarity in color between the vessel and the background. Here the boundary can be sensed from different directions of the paint strokes. A fascinating method.

A comment on the color in Morandi’s paintings: The pictures shown here were scanned from the book currently sold at the Met ‘Giorgio Morandi 1890 – 1964’. After I bought the book, I compared the colors of its reproduction with the actual colors of the paintings while standing right in front of the  paintings and I took notes. Regrettably, the colors in all the reproductions are consistently warmer than the beautifully cool colors in the paintings. GM painted cool yellows, reds, greys and not in the warmer, ‘candified’ hues shown in the reproductions. What a disservice to the GM’s legacy to falsify the colors in what may be become an important resource book.  I attempted to reduce some of  false warmth by desaturating yellow in my scanned photos.

What do I like in the two paintings shown here besides their ‘dissolving boundaries’? In the 1960 painting, the cool red is fascinating. There is a ‘vibration’ between the white vessel in front, the oval of the  top of the red vessel and the cooler greyish vessel in the back. In GM’s last 1964 painting, the cool, feeble looking yellow of the vessel contrasts with the clear turquoise (clearer than apparent on the web pic) of the round shape in front. I had not seen this turquoise hue in any of his other paintings. – At death’s door, GM expressed something like ‘how very much he still wanted to realize his new ideas with painting’ – a touching thought.

In summary, during my first visit of the Morandi exhibition, I embraced two of his 1914 Natura Morta because of their clear lines. In contrast, during my second visit, I learned to very much appreciate the two Natura Morta shown here, painted about 50 years later.

It’s been instructive to continue experimenting with photography à la Morandi: not attempting to imitate, but rather to explore some of the themes he seems to be working with, or at least what I find myself working with as I go about it. One thing I realized looking at more of his pictures, both online at the Metropolitan and the Morandi Museum, and also in a book found at the library, is that he was often interested in the modeling of masses by the light falling on him. This was contrary to my impression from the quite flat images that seem to be more common. Perhaps working in both modes was his own form of experimentation.

My first job was to find a plain background, and also work with lighter, more Morandi-like colors (though I personally tend to prefer dark ones) than before. In arranging a still life with bottles, etc, I was very aware that it was hard for me to get anything interesting. I certainly didn’t succeed. On the other hand, I can’t say I find Morandi’s arrangements very interesting, either. It became quite clear that playing with edge alignments, making them rhyme or overlap or extend, afforded a necessary compensating interest that occupied Morandi even more than it did me. Picture after picture from the book exhibited the same kinds of relationships. In this vein, Morandi was said by his friend Roberto Longhi to have admired Seurat for “mathematically” planned compositions and Mondrian for his strict rigor (for more, click on “The Care for the Image” at the Morandi Museum home page.

Another observation on composition: Morandi seems to have had little concern for the negative space in his still lifes, or at least they seem unremarkable that way. His objects are, in fact, almost always jammed together, leaving no negative space at all. My second composition, with one bottle well off to the side, is very un-Morandi.

In general, Morandi’s attention seems to have been mostly on the individual objects, and certain aspects of their close relationships. I noticed that one effect of vague boundaries or coincidental alignments is to draw the eye to those places, where I find a local appeal stronger than the whole.

I did make one attempt to create a more “painterly” image by partially posterizing it to simulate a limited palette. Below, the top image is the result of that treatment, the bottom is the original. I’ve deliberately not overemphasized this, so you have to look a little closely to see the difference.

If nothing else, this exercise has convinced me of the usefulness of copying as a means of learning style and technique. It’s been helpful for me in getting to know Morandi. And I expect that some aspects of his approach will find their way into future photographs.

Have you ever engaged in copying as an instructional method? Was it effective for you?

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?