Art & Perception

Jer and I are now at the Montana Artists’ Refuge, Basin, Montana, in the southwest part of the state. I am painting, he is writing and editing, and we are both experiencing the dislocation and joy of a new adventure.

While the residency has all kinds of ins-and-outs, basically I came here to paint. And painting is what I’ve been doing.

Basin lies in a geographical bowl, surrounded by pine-covered mountains. It’s a mining town — still has a functioning gold mine — and seems to have had its moments of prosperity, most of which were in the past.

Basin Street, Basin, Montana. The main drag.

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I was fascinated by the research of an ophthalmologist that focused on visual infirmities plaguing artists in their later years and the effects of the infirmity on their art in Tuesday’s New York Times science section.

“On the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, a three-canvas set of Monet’s water lilies spreads across a gallery wall in dazzling homage to the artist at the height of his brilliance. Off to one side is a painting of the Japanese bridge at Giverny from the early ’20s, when Monet’s cataracts were at their worst. It is a disturbing mix of dark reds and browns, much darker than the water lilies, yet just as compelling, perhaps, in its brooding intensity.”

“What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”

Degas suffered macular degeneration, Renoir had rheumatoid arthritis, Mary Cassatt had cataracts and seizures attended to van Gogh. In almost all of these cases, the infirmities that attacked these famous artists happened after their places were assured in history as great artists.

This has led me to speculate that once an artist gains recognition, it does not really matter what that artist develops, we just look for and want confirmation of the fact that it was indeed painted by the person – be it illegible scrawls, colors incoherently massing into one other to form a dirty mess or just plain lack of attention to details (details that were earlier captured to meticulous effect) – it does not matter. We overlook incompetence (brought on by the onset of disease, drug overdose or otherwise) and reward the artist for what s(he) were once famous for…

Claude Monet, ‘Waterlily Pond’, 1899; Oil on canvas

Note: His vision problems did not start until 1912

Claude Monet, ‘The Japanese Bridge’, 1918; Oil on canvas

Recently I came to realize that depending on the meaning of a painting, a new style of painting arises… I have discovered that my love for painting the perfect beauty and fantasy since childhood was always an escape to reality that has helped me throughout the years.

However, when I attempt to express my fears another rather darker and psychological style arises as if, another personality or pseudonym takes over.

This painting is called ‘The Verdict’’ and is about my feelings of academic anxiety and often discrimination.

The Verdict, oil on canvas

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Germany is celebrating Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), an important representative of early expressionism, on the 100th anniversary of her death. From 1906 to 1907, she painted nude self-portraits, at that time an unprecedented opus by a female painter.

Her work inspired me to compare female nudity seen through her eyes in 1906/07 to those painted by males between 1918 and 1570 – Modigliani, Gauguin, Renoir and Tintoretto.

I. Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (1918) Paula Modersohn-Becker (1906) more… »

Anita Shapolsky gallery last month hosted a very eclectic exhibition titled ‘Writers who paint’. Among others, it had under its purview artworks by accomplished writers like Jonatham Lethem, Jack Kerouac, W. B. Yeats and Aldous Huxley. I thought the idea was a very cool one, firstly, you had insight into their minds through their writing and now you could explore their paintings, drawings and other objects of their visual imagination through the lens of the individual’s written words. It is precisely for this reason that I think that the artist blogs are a new form of a self-portrait that an artist can develop temporally…
Of course, some of the few art blogs that seemed to cover this event seemed to think otherwise. The comments were very telling of the age of specialization we live in and what happens if we transgress even a little bit from our supposed spheres of expertise.

“Writers should stick to their areas of competence”
“Writers doing art results in art that is just not good”
“More bad art strung together upon a theme”
“Cult of the celebrity in overdrive”
“While you can accidentally take a good photograph, it takes years to become a good photographer”

While I think that the wisdom of the online crowds is a marker for the current times, reading some of these comments gives one a view that unless one is specialized in the arts (like an art degree or is a full time artist), there is a danger of their art being perceived as inferior to full time artist. What happened to the age of renaissance men and women who could dabble in multiple fields and excel at many of them? Are the lanes leading that great town called Specialization getting so narrow that only people with the right calling cards and pedigree are offered entry at the appropriate tavern houses along the way?

I am most interested in your comments.

Weldon Kees, ‘After Hours’, Oil on canvas, 33″ x 43″

Winter is now here, having held off till mid-November. Last weekend I headed in to Pine Creek Falls, hoping to find an entrancing combination of ice, snow, water, and rock, as I had last year at this time. That’s when I had the first inklings of waterfalls as a potential subject. As I gear up for another round with Jay, attempting to come to grips with what that subject means to me, it seemed a good idea to return to the source.

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Let’s try for those images again.

Pele representation

Carved Pele in fruit mode.

Pele perfume bottles

Sorry for the inconvenience