Birgit Zipser, watery fantasy, 11×14 inches, oil on panel
‘What I learned when I learned to draw’ by Adam Gopnick, The New Yorker, June 27th, discusses Jacob Collins‘ approach to drawing, which involves perceptual rather than conceptual viewing. The idea is to disengage from drawing symbols – conceptual schema of an arm or a face – and draw what you actually see. What you actually see may be a funny shape, a frog or an outline of a new African state, due to the play of light and shade on the body of the model. Thus, Gopnick was guided to learn to draw by ‘searching for strange shapes to break his symbol set’.
Jacob Collins in his “traditional realist revivalism” paints nudes, still lifes and landscapes. I may understand how the artist can draw a person modeling for him or cherries in a bowl by searching for shades and shapes rather than by using conceptual symbols. But doesn’t this approach break down when landscapes are drawn that contain water?
Water does not hold still for the slow musing approach to drawing that Adam Gopnick tells us Jacob Collins uses. My question is does Collins paint water using his symbol set of water?
Good question, Birgit. I suppose you could do memory training along with your drawing. One of my crit buddies looks at a landscape and then turns her back and works on her painting. Her work is near-abstract — somewhat like yours, in fact. There’s a restfulness with these big forms that I like. I also admire the transparency you’ve achieved — not so easy with oils.
I liked the Gopnik piece and have looked at the NY Times site a couple of times, but not seriously.
June,
I am glad that you mentioned the transparency. Practicing transparency was the aim of this little painting. I have been looking at the garments of Botticelli’s ladies for a while and was hoping that I could achieve that sort of transparency painting water.
Meeting with the local artists here has an impact on me. One of them liked the lines at the bottom of the yellow sand, lines that I had been dissatisfied with because they did not properly portrait the crumbling sand. Looking at them now again, I am musing whether I should incorporate more such lines into my paintings. Another artist showed me her work – abstract flowing lines, interesting pastel-type colors. After this experience today, I was dissatisfied with the nitty gritty aspect of what I was painting later in the afternoon. But then, I usually hit a phase of dissatisfaction with my picture until I figure out where to go from there. Wrestling with the angels.
Birgit:
This painting reminds me of certain images taken by Brett Weston in which he captures the relationship of serrated crest of dune with raking shadows. A difference may be an apparent concern for sharp and solid contrasts on his part vs. your pursuit of transparencies. I believe that you have taken on the greater challenge.
Jay:
I googled Brett Weston. His photos are stunning.
A couple of weeks ago, I joined artists for their sunday morning breakfast at an Empire pub – painters, sculptors, illustrators. I already have learned a lot from them. One of them gave me a DVD with an interview of Francis Bacon. It was interesting to learn that he painted from photograph, photos illustrating action. This resonated with me since I am also interested in action – the fluidity of water.
Bacon said that he decided not learn from other artists, but rather invent painting for himself. Not looking at other artists’ landscape images, exhibited in local galleries, might give me a better chance to arrive at my own perceptions and paintings.
What comes to mind is the old expression “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Not having found a local workshop that I care to take, I am following Karl’s advice to figure out my own path.
Birgit:
So you had Bacon with your eggs.
You may. But it’s a funny thing: some of the most outrageously inventive people spent a lot of time consciously being influenced. Cezanne hung around museums, Van Gogh had a thing for Millet and various Impressionists. Picasso was a visual pack rat. They chose their leaders.
Jay,
I had thought that Van Gogh was self-taught. Learning from you about Millet, I found his ‘Haystack’. Next autumn, I will look at it at the MET.
Some of Bacon’s faces remind me of Picasso. Googling ‘Bacon and Picasso’, I found:
by Anne Baldassari.
The examples that you gave me suggest: Learn from the Best! I will follow your advice and I will ‘hang around museums’.
Birgit:
Not to be contrarian here but I spent eleven years around the best at the art museum and it seems that I was more cowed than inspired by the exposure. But maybe I just couldn’t get into any particular vibe with anyone at the time. Even now I will be occasionally reminded of another’s work in something I have done, but it will be unclear as to whether I was influenced as such. I think that I can be influenced, but more at an unconscious level.
Jay,
Not having an art background, I have always felt free to shrug off the famous. The only Rembrandt that I adore is his 22 yr-self-portrait , still in my mind’s eye after having spent a long time looking at it in Amsterdam in the early eighties. Now it is spoiled for viewing, shielded with thick, protective glass and the internet picture does not do it justice. Standing right in front of the oil with nothing between me and it, the painting was simply luminous.
What brought on my dissatisfaction with viewing local landscape artwork is the weekly show by Margo Burian. I followed her work for the last three years. The first year, I was struck by her palette – soft brown/pink/greys- and her broad strokes over large canvases. But I only loved a small painting with greyish brown strokes in the periphery and then a small orange spot in what seemed like the middle of a lake – mysterious. Now, two years later, her paintings has become more representational with traditional beach views and her palette is brighter – painfully so in one of her paintings where the sharp red foliage bites the teal green of the adjacent water -and to top off the painting, her first attempt at traditional clouds. Again, there is a small painting that appeals to me, an abstract winter landscape with wonderfully harmonizing colors.
After belaboring what appeals to me, I finally come to my question: Is it usually the case that one only resonates with one picture or a very small percentage of an artist’s work? Is there some mysterious spark that is only ignited if the artist’s vision matches what we ourselves bring to the art work? Is the rest of the business confined to some appreciation for techniques? For example, I am looking forward to scrutinizing Botticelli’s ladies to study the transparency of their gowns.
Birgit:
If I said what you said about Botticelli’s gowns I would sound like a dirty old man.
I’m hugely appreciative of Frank Lloyd Wright, tiresome egoist that he was. There’s something – a rugged felicity – that runs through his work that I respond to without being able to explain. A spot at Falling Water gets to me especially. It’s on the second level and constitutes the juncture of axes and spaces, with a window that reveals a trellis way below. I stood there with chills running up and down my spine.
I might say that it’s more the aroma that I pick up, than the bottle it comes in.
Jay,
Googling ‘Falling wate’r, I saw the beautiful building but had trouble finding its location. Where is it?
I am ruminating on: “it’s more the aroma that I pick up, than the bottle it comes in”.
Birgit:
Actually it’s Fallingwater. It’s in the hills southeast of Pittsburgh.
Birgit, it’s me again. I have been engaged in thinking further about this problem since July 17, and your note on FB brought me back to it. The difficulty with water is, as you note, it has not much in the way of shape unless it is countered by something on shore.
Two thoughts, though. There are shapes in water if you look at it from a distance. They do tend to fluctuate, although underlying patterns can emerge if you have time and patience. Islanders in the Pacific apparently used wave patterns (which are lines that make shapes) to navigate incredible distances. Looking at the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I could see “V” shapes that were evident in subtly changing colors.
The second thought has to do with “shape finding” in general. I’ve always had a mental block about that process. But this summer a workshop instructor talked about “planes.” Planes put shapes into a context for me, and suddenly I could see them, because for me, context is paramount. Shapes just bounce around aimlessly, but planes are spatial orientations.
Don’t know if this furthers anything here, but I couldn’t resist.
June,
Shapes in water: Standing on the Empire Bluff at Lake Michigan, I enjoy sketching and photographing patterns in the water. Most recently, I shot a picture of a salmon fisherman standing in the water surrounded by different water patterns, this time due to the streaming of the platte river into the lake.
I remember you talking about PLANES on your own website. Is this a method used in Cubism? This week, I will visit a Feininger exhibit at the Whitney. One of the local artists here at the Sleeping Bear Dunes, Roger Matson, paints, using water color, overlapping, partially transparent planes using structures such as the barns (our local D.H. Barn), with fabulous colors, white, grey, bluish. Telling him that his paintings remind me of Feininger, he told me that he was more influenced by Phillip Pearlstein.
Personally, I’ve used this technique since I was a boy, and I’d never found water to be an issue.
When I sketch something in front of me, I allow my eyes to skim over it, at this time I lose focus on any particular part of the object, and in my minds eye I build a shape map of whatever I’m painting or sketching, at which point I can pretty much just slam it onto the paper without having to look up except for details.
For more complex scenes, I just focus on important shapes and make a faint ‘under-sketch’ of sorts, after which I can casually detail individual parts of the sketch.
This may be down to the fact that I’ve been doing this since I was 5, and have had plenty of practise, but I’m not sure.
Norlick,
Yesterday, I asked Tim Lewis whether he composes his watercolors in his mind before starting to paint. He thinks that he does not do that. Rather, he paints what comes into his mind, letting one shape or line follow the next using his intuition. Tim finishes his paintings in one sitting, hoping not to being interrupted.
My approach has been very different. I visualize what I want to paint with more or less success in my mind’s eye. – It feels difficult getting back to painting and visualizing after a 5 months hiatus during which I only practiced some drawing – initially in doing life figure drawing in a class and then, because of travelling, imitating Rodin ‘Erotic sketches’ on a computer.
You are fortunate to have trained your brain to perceive shapes since an early age. I am working on that now. Thus, your comment serves as an inspiration to me to keep trying.