Art & Perception

Here are the drawings I have been working on in the new year.

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For some of us, resolving a painting is more difficult then it should be. Once started, I am not able to see what I am doing with a clean mind. There are elements that I fall in love with a try to work around them, but never seem to get the entire painting to work. Recently I discovered that a painting that was testing my identity as an artist (another way saying, gave me great doubts about my ability) only needed for my scrape out the one thing that I thought was working for me, in order for the the rest of the painting to come alive.

Occasionally or almost always, the paintings become overworked. Knowing when to stop is a good thing. I have tried all of the little tricks you can use to play with your mind, like hiding the painting in a closet for a week, the black mirror, turning it upside down etc. Anybody have any other ideas?

Thanks to my New Years resolutions, I took my camera on my walk this morning. Making photos every day — what’s the big deal? Photography is just a matter of pressing a button, right?

I did the same walk around the harbor that I do every day when I am in Wilhelmshaven. But today I felt exhausted afterwards, and it wasn’t from the physical weight of the camera. I felt tired because I used my out-of-shape “photographic vision,” a special way of looking at the world through a camera. It took about half an hour of walking and shooting to get into “photographic vision,” and it now persists for some time after I put down the camera. “Photographic vision” lets me take photographs without using a camera, in a sense. I assume all the photographers have this; probably the professionals live with it all the time. For an amateur like me, it yields a sort of “mental muscle ache,” something like what you feel when you first start exercising muscles that you didn’t realize you had. All the more reason for the daily workout!

Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will be well worth while, and will do you a world of good.

— Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell’Arte

In 2006 I made sculpture; at the close of the year I began to take an interest in photography. What I found was that weeks could pass without my even touching a paint brush. Recently, I have been painting daily without doing any sculpture or photography at all.

Is it good to abandon one art form for another, even temporarily? One could argue that, in some cases, it is good. But here is another way to think about it, in analogy to physical exercise: would it be good to give up daily exercise for the sake of art? Thinking of it this way, the answer is, of course not.

My goal for 2007 is to draw, to paint, to do sculpture and to do photography, every single day.

My goal is not to try to accomplish something remarkable every day in these various media. The goal is to keep myself in “condition” or “artistically fit” in the same way that I stay “physically fit.” Stated in this way, I don’t think this New Year’s resolution is too ambitious to follow. We shall see . . .

Do you have New Year’s resolutions pertaining to art that you would like to share?

It’s easy to say, “all children are artists,” or “everyone is born an artist.” But let’s be serious: how old do you have to be before people take you seriously as an artist?

If you are recognized as an artist as an adult, does your “early work” then become art as well? What if your “early work” was not so good? What if (as in the case of my sister Nina) only your “early work” was good?

Does an artist need to be older than ten to make real art? Is children’s art “Art”?

. . .

related post: Edward Winkleman, What Is an “Emerging Artist”?

When I made the transition to digital, I thought, oh, this is just another tool to make an image, it’s not going to change anything. Boy, was I wrong. There are a lot of details I could get sidetracked on here, but suffice to say that, 2 years on, I am still in the readjustment phase that this technology is having on both my commercial work and my personal sensibility.

Digital is a big watershed shift in how photographic images come to be. But there are less portentous choices. The issue at hand is, how do you tell the difference between a tool that meaningfully adds a voice, and one that’s a fad? Photography is full of examples of process overtaking content, and it’s a common problem in advertising work. Remember how dreadful all those composited images looked when that first became possible? In the commercial realm, there are always the “instant art” solutions that one practitioner raises to a high level, then everyone copies it. Anyone remember the Hosemaster Lighting System that was so cool looking in 1988, and so overdone by 1992? The current craze is the “Lensbaby” aesthetic, which is, at last, raising a backlash: read this great rant that I came across the other day. In the fine art photography field, infrared seems to raise its grainy, overexposed head every few years, and everyone seems to be perpetually rediscovering the Holga (nee Diana) camera look.

This is why it is really useful to restrict one’s palette. I have a fair bit of equipment, because I’ve been a pro for awhile, but I don’t buy gear very often. And when I hit on a system that works, I’m loathe to change it. When I shot film I shot one kind for color, and one kind for black and white. Now 90% of my photos I take with one camera body and one lens (well, it’s a zoom, but still), and I rarely play around with alternate ways of processing my images. It’s hard in the digital realm though, because you barely get to learn how to do what you do before someone rewrites the software on you.

I am hard pressed to think of a memorable body of work that doesn’t have a consistency in execution, but that doesn’t also have a meaning that transcends those tools. Their marks have meaning. Ansel Adams applied his technical precision at the service of what, at the time, was a revolutionary way of seeing the American landscape. Cartier-Bresson used a the handheld camera, making work meant to be experienced on the printed page and eschewing a finished print aesthetic (Ever see his original prints? They’re dreadful! They weren’t the point.). Early in his career Emmit Gowin used a lens that didn’t cover the field of his 8×10 back for his inimitable family imagery. Richard Avedon took the white backdrop to a height that has yet to be matched.

Beware of copying the tricks of a master. It may be a good pedagogical exercise, but it’s unlikely to lead you to your unique voice, the mark you make your own. More likely, you’ve come across your latest reiteration of the Lensbaby.

Making money at art is as easy as jumping off a cliff.

Therein lies the rub, as has been said.

Antaeus, Robert Liberace

In high school, starting when I was about sixteen, I fell in love with pastels. Not those hard waxy kinds, but the good old fashioned soft oils. Some artists naturally gravitate towards figure drawing, and I was definitely one of those. People are ever interesting. Always different, every blessed one of them beautiful in some way. Being something of a jock, it came naturally to draw the football players practicing, the divers taking high leaps, the basketball players dunking, the cheerleaders dancing.

I became a regular fixture at practices, whatever the sport. I’d do these wicked fast gesture drawings, then take them home and work up some more elaborate studies. There I’d discover what parts of the figures I needed to pay attention to (the hands — geez) and watch and draw some more. Then I’d start combining the figures in multi person action scenes, and these would become pastels. I had only a little paper, and the pastels, given me by my mom, were dear, so I developed a deft, no mistake kind of style.

One day, one of the deans asked to see my finished stuff. I brought a portfolio to his office. He already knew I had no interest in art classes, so he wasn’t one of those dumb counselor types who thought I should be taking art classes. No. He happened to have some connections with a local newspaper and a gallery, but he insisted that if I wanted him to make some calls, then I’d need to become more involved with some school activities, like helping out at functions where he’d be happy to see my work displayed.

So that was my first show. A pep rally. All the adulation was pretty embarrassing to me. I was not comfortable with all the attention, but it got worse. I got a call from a gallery and then a newspaper reporter.
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