If you paint the sun, you are always confronted with a specific choice: you either have to try and establish the correct value relationship by making the sun very light on your canvas or you must go for the color, in which case the value relationship will be incorrect but the color relationship will be closer to the truth. The reason for this is simply that the highest value pigment we have is pure white. (It is unlikely we would even use pure white because a glob of pure would look “chalky” or artificial.) Once we add color, say a tiny bit of cadmium yellow light, it would look somewhat more real, but then the brightness or value would be diminished by that tiny amount. And if we were to then mix in small amounts of cadmium orange or maybe vermillion, we would probably get closer to the actual color of the sun, particularly if it were low in the sky, but at the same time the value or brightness would decrease even further. Such is the nature of paint as compared to actual light, or energy. So the choice is either to go for the value, white with a tiny bit of yellow (which would be the highest value color note we could make), or to go for the color – a hot orangey-red color, perhaps. It’s one or the other. But both are impossible. Let me use Monet’s famous Impression Sunrise to illustrate this point:

On the left is the actual famous painting and on the right is the same painting but in black and white. Notice how the sun in the black and white version practically disappears. What this means is that in the actual painting (in color), the sun is the same value as the darker blue colors. In other words, Monet has sacrificed value in order to get the color. Let’s see what it would have looked like had he done the reverse, if he had sacrificed color in order to get closer to the proper value relationship.

In the image on the left I have replaced Monet’s orangey-red sun and its reflection with white and a tiny bit of yellow. Notice that in the black and white version on the right, the sun is the brightest thing in the sky; the value relationship is relatively correct. But in order to get closer to the correct value, the richness of the color is lost.

Here’s the point: there is no way to get rich color and high value with paint. It comes down to choice. Some artists (George Inness comes to mind) have made wonderful paintings where the sun is bright but weak in color. Monet, however, always seems to have gone for the color.

My Big Fat Warning!

I am hopeful that this type of blog provides some food for thought. But I hesitate in writing this sort of thing because the information also feeds a mechanical process that becomes a formula. It is fine, if not necessary, to have knowledge in the back of your head, but when you are painting, the process must be driven by the feelings you have as you become one with nature, when you resonate or vibrate with the light that is absorbing you, and you it. So it would be unwise to go out and say, “I’m going to approach it the way Monet did as opposed to the way Inness did.” Rather, wait until you get there. Open yourself to seduction. Will you get lost in the warm volcanic vermillion of the sun’s warmth or will you surrender to the bright dancing notes of a sparkling sun? Formula picture making is so 9 to 5.

If I paint ten paintings, I generally keep about 3 or 4. That’s it. Most don’t work out. I think the reason for this is that it is just plain difficult to get into that other dimension where I’m not making pictures but where I just get swept away. There are times when I really do believe that I have forgotten how to paint. So I have to remind myself: don’t paint pictures; let what is before you act as a prompt. Respond. Realize your feelings as you make the marks. Get it through the color. Get beyond the facts. Trust in your creativity. Let go.

Then one day I’m out there painting and I sense that it’s coming back to me. I remember. In fact, I think I’m growing, getting better. It goes on like that. Up and down. Up and down.

I mention this because I think it is worth restating particularly for young artists who feel an inordinate pressure to do something “that is cool,” “heavy,” “dark,” or “challenging.”  There is something to be said for big, dramatic breakthroughs – the advent of abstraction for example, and/or the subsequent return to figurative painting in the Bay Area Figurative movement where Diebenkorn, Park, Bischoff, Oliveira, Neri and others used big, simplified, almost abstract strokes of color to express who they were. But for the most part, we would do well to drop the term avant-garde and to stop thinking in terms of art movements generally. So much of the “it has never been done before” shock-of-the-new during the latter half of the 20^th century was contrived, top down, investment driven efforts to turn junk into iconic art products.

Does anyone out there remember Fabian? He was a teen idol who came after Elvis. Well, he didn’t exactly come after Elvis. Because of Elvis, record producers wanted to cash in on the creation of a second Elvis, so they discovered Fabian. I guess you could say he was okay, but like most 20^th century art “movements,” he was totally manufactured.

You don’t have to sprout wings and fly about your studio to do something “that has never been done before.” It has never been done before if it is new and refreshing to you.

Many years ago, I went outside to paint for the first time and did two little 8”x10” landscapes. I brought them in to show my teacher, Bill Schultz. He made some supportive comments, suggesting one was more “successful” than the other. Then he said, “I’m glad to see that you are going outside and starting small. Now, after you do two or three hundred of these, go on to 9”x12.”  I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

The image at the top is a detail from the image on the left. The people at the café were moving about. How was I to paint them? I had no interest in a literal interpretation. I was more interested in loving what I saw simply as visual elements. So if I saw a flash of blue, I made a mark to try and get the color and didn’t care much about anything else. I think it works.

One can get a sense of the direction painting has taken by comparing early 20^th century artists Marcel Duchamp, born in France, with Robert Brackman, born in the Ukraine. (Brackman, as many of you know, immigrated to the US and was my teacher’s teacher.) A story I often tell of Brackman, through whom our method passes, is that he spent seven years doing nothing but underpaintings. A serious student was he to be sure. Duchamp, we are told, essentially became bored with painting, preferred applying himself to chess, but not before he decided, in effect, to play games with the art cognoscenti, of whom he was the proverbial darling and advisor. Duchamp, as you know, contributed to human achievement in art by exhibiting such “ready-mades” as the snow shovel (exactly like the one you would buy in a store) and, perhaps more famously, an ordinary urinal, dubbed The Fountain in 1917.

Duchamp, as either genius or pawn, remains a central figure in 20^th century visual art. Again Marquis: “Duchamp opened the door – even the museum door – to art featuring feces, urine, and other bodily fluids; to art based on junk recovered from the city dump; to art involving cadavers and maggots; and to art with aggressively sexual themes. Artists who display their own naked or provocatively clothed bodies may also point to Duchamp. In short, the avant-garde art of the late twentieth century flaunts impropriety, defiance, messiness, and snickering disdain for the vast majority of museum-goers.” [2]

While I greatly admire Brackman’s work, it doesn’t “send” me. His subject matter and compositions seem too traditional, even old fashion in a way. More importantly for my taste, he carried his paintings too far. They appear too finished. This is especially true if one only sees his work through old reproductions. However, I have seen his work in person and in person one can feel the emotion that his complexity of color and finesse of line exude. His sense of tonality is positively haunting especially in his pastel drawings, as in the one above. And I have seen work of his that was “unfinished,” where the verve or “glamour,” as he would call it, jumps off the canvas. When he was 86 a student said to him that he (the student) noticed more color in his work; Brackman’s response was that this was because he (at 86) was beginning to see more color. No clever stunts. No success by scandal. And, a bored painter he was not.

One of his greatest strengths was also that of an inspiring teacher. Like Robert Henri, with whom he studied, he understood the painting process as well as the spirit of art and used concision, drama, and wit to get students to understand. I used to hear my teacher recount endless studio stories that both informed and made you laugh. This one, which is more about Brackman’s temperament, is instructive nonetheless:

One morning Brackman received a call in his Connecticut studio. “Hello, Mr. Brackman. I’m Peter Worthington. You may not remember me but I studied with you many years ago. And I have a favor to ask – and, of course, I will be happy to compensate you for your time.”

“You see,” Worthington continued, “I’ve just been appointed first violinist of the Boston Symphony and tonight my friends are throwing me a party. And I was thinking how interesting it would be if I could do a little still life of my violin and have it there as part of a musical tableau for tonight’s party. Now – I remember that you used to break the painting process down into stages and I was wondering if you could walk me through the stages, once more, over the phone.”

Brackman replied: “Well Mr. Worthington, in fact, I do remember you and it is so ironic that you should call at this very moment. You see, tonight my friends are also giving me a party and just before you called, I was thinking how nice it would be if by tonight I could play – oh, let’s see – Brahm’s Violin Concerto. Could you please walk me through that over the phone?”

“I don’t think that is very funny Mr. Brackman.”

“Neither do I.”

 CLICK!!

I saw this diagram one time where the history of painting was presented as a tree with all these branches first emerging from a trunk and then from one another suggesting that one art movement begot another and so on. Duchamp was a major branch, of course, with all these smaller branches coming out of it. Interestingly, Brackman was considered important enough to be one of the branches too; but he was represented as one of the dead ends, a branch that virtually no one takes any more. Pretty accurate diagram, actually.

I often envy non-plein air painters and then again I don’t. At times I wish I could stay in the studio, close the doors, put on beat-up comfortable clothes and paint without distraction. No dragging my easel and supplies out to wherever. No being on the spot. No being so vulnerable. And yet, a thousand times over, I end up choosing to paint outside, in the midst of the activity of a community and of course in the midst of the air, vibrating colors, wind, smell, sounds that cohere and somehow draw me into an another dimension. Let’s just call it a rush. It’s the reason why I paint. I really don’t think about the results of the painting as I do it. The canvas is a kind of magical surface that when I mark with a brush, I am propelled into this other dimension.

Lest I sound like a loony bird, take a look at the much heralded right brain pathway that neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor (whom I referenced in our last newsletter) has described and others have identified as part of the creative experience:

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about right here right now….it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me…in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

Hoping, thus, that my credibility has been enhanced, let me explain more about the rush dimension, as it were, that painting delivers to me. It is in this space I become more, I grow, I feel larger, and, most importantly, I am able to see and feel more deeply. But here’s the problem: the rush isn’t easily accessible. I may go out 5 times and only access it once or twice. Or there may be just moments, a few minutes here and there, where I feel I’m in that “zone.” And is very often the case, the feeling of having a deeper experience seems to slip away much like those nice dreams that we try to re-enter upon awakening.

The photo above is of a painting (that measures 4 feet by 2 feet) that failed largely because I could not sustain the dream-like feelings that had brought me to the point to when the photo was taken (just after my second time out or after about 3 hours work). During that second time out, I felt as though I was lost in a good way or maybe I should say captured by the totality of the plein-air experience. To the non-painters among you, it means that the color/space/atmosphere was practically drug-like. The boats and trees were no longer boats and trees. Instead they were just color, melting, moving, vibrating, and lush. I felt alive, happy, joyful, intense, visually articulate and wanting to converse, wanting to be touched by the swirling rose and yellow and green energy around me, all in a sea of innocence, wonder, pleasure, and enchantment.

When I got back to my studio and put the painting down and stepped back, I gave myself permission to assess the thing critically because I was no longer in the process. I said to myself, “Yes, it’s working. All those feelings come back to me. It’s alive.” The drawing seemed off balanced. But no matter, I wanted to give it another shot. I wanted to push the thing forward, to make it express, somehow, more vitality and more mystery. But (and this is a big “but”) pushing it meant that I would have to find an experience that was actually richer and deeper in some way than the experience that had brought me to where the painting was at that point.

Allow me to articulate this thought carefully: pushing in this sense means to push oneself further, to strain or reach further. Feeling and seeing more richly, however, does not come about by simply looking more intently. The particularity of any given feeling, when I paint, arises out of an expression of who I am in the moment that I am making choices. A writer may choose one word or a series of words from a vocabulary of 100,000 separate words, for example. In my case, as a painter, I must choose a very specific color and a way of applying the color, also from thousands of possibilities. That is how I express myself as a painter. I must act, I must choose. My choices will differ from someone else’s. That is why a painting will be called, if it is sincere, a Monet or a Renoir or a Smith, Jones, or Fresia.

Notice how the process unfolds. The brush stroke may begin out of something shadowy and inchoate within me in that I have a sense of what I want to do, but it is unclear really: some alizarin, with some white and a little bit of cobalt blue and I want to use a broad long stroke, let us say, to express that set of inchoate feelings. But in that very moment when my choices are made manifest on the canvas, in the very moment of making the mark, the feeling is clarified and made real. This is what is meant when Cézanne or Monet said – and they said it often – that they were struggling to realize (to make real) particular inchoate feelings as they paint.[1] I become determinant in a particular way precisely because (in any given moment) I choose a color or line or whatever, make the mark and – swoosh – realize a feeling that in turn permits me to see just a little bit more.[2]  In order to push the thing forward, then, I would have to realize deeper feelings by making strokes that themselves would have to be part of that realization. Or to put it another way, I would have to grow that much more in order to get to that new place of seeing and feeling.

At my designated time to go out again, however, it was cloudy for several days. Then it rained. Finally, when the sun had returned, I went back out. But the humidity was gone. The air was crisp and dry. Everything was a slightly different color: the visual whole was just something altogether different. Not hugely different but enough. It was like buying that great bottle of wine only to find that it wasn’t the same, it disappointed. Or, it was like seeing a friend, who for some reason is distracted, and the evening falls flat. I simply wasn’t moved.

So I was confronted with a problem. Do I paint and try to catch a new rush? Or should I wait for that magical day to return with exactly the right weather and colors? Experience told me not to wait but to move forward with the new day, to find something else that felt magical and to weave it into what was already there.[3] Bad decision. My friend wasn’t the same. The wine was sour. Whatever life had existed in the painting seemed to get buried beneath a layer of uninspired miserable strokes of paint.

So what can we take away from this experience? Maybe the most important lesson is that the activity of painting has more to do with growing a tiny bit than it does with making a picture. Pushing ourselves and feeling that extra new bit of power (the enhanced ability to see) explains the thrill. Some of you may be thinking, what if I tried to fix the painting or go back to the studio and resurrect the old one somehow? Sure, I could have done that, but that approach turns on an entirely different understanding of what it means to paint. That would be the picture maker for whom the pay off comes from an external measure, “the result” or “the sale” or “the approval by another.” Contrast this approach to the one I’m outlining here where the payoff is in becoming more complete by virtue of one’s expressive choices and where the pay off is always in the moment of creativity.

That’s what was nice about that failure. For a few hours I was becoming more able. I was becoming more me. There is no painting to show for it, now. Just the photo of something that was what it was at a particular moment in time.

Perhaps it wasn’t a failure after all.

It’s that time of year when I sit down and put my order together to replenish my supply of paint. I hate to tell nasty little secrets out of school, but it is difficult to get decent art supplies in Italy; at least if you do the kind of painting that I do. The market just doesn’t exist for plein air types or neo-Impressionists.

So I thought it might be useful to respond to the question, what brands and why? And if you read to the very end, I have a great tip for you. I have a sure fire way of keeping the paint on my palette from drying up.

It seems to be the case that with many decent painters, the number of paints (as in colors) one uses diminishes over time. Kevin MacPherson, for example, uses just primary colors – more or less.  He’s not alone. I often envy painters like that. How easy it must be to order paint, not to mention dragging supplies out to the field. However, I am moving in the opposite direction: the more colors and choices the better.

If I were rich, I would hire a number of art sherpa’s to carry around a palette of about 100 colors, all piled up in huge amounts. I would like my palette to look like a gelato stand, a variety of flavors dripping with abundance, inviting, seductive, very nearly begging to be tasted, eaten, consumed. Not only would such a palette look amazing and delicious, there are just so many incredible colors that some manufacturers make that, I believe, cannot possibly be duplicated by mixing primary colors. And as a rich guy I would spare no expense. I would buy brands like Old Holland, Maimeri, or Schmincke Mussini. Old Holland, I think, is the top of the line. Some colors are to die for. Super expensive, too. One of these days I’m going to splurge and just buy about 20 tubes, each a different color, each 150 ml, each goopy as can be, and just have at it. Or maybe not.

What I can afford are Rembrandt and Gamblin. For the money, they are darn good. So I use those two brands primarily. For white I use Classico because I can get it easily in Italy. And white needs to be extra goopy given that I use tons of it, probably 10 times as much as with all the other colors combined.

“Student grade” paint is precisely that; they are for students. Very practical. Very cheap, synthetic and the cobalts and cadmiums (which are the more expensive colors if you buy the real pigments, tend to gray down when mixed.) Synthetic cadmiums and cobalts will say hue as in cadmium orange hue. In this context, hue means fake. But what the heck, they’re super cheap. And you can still make decent paintings with them. And there are many student grade brands, one as good (or as lousy) as the next. Winton, Amsterdam, Daley-Rowney Georgian are examples.

As far as brushes, I use, and will only use, flat filberts rounded tips. Utrecht makes the best inexpensive version of these brushes: 209-F. If you don’t have access to Utrecht, I would suggest going on-line to see what kind of brush I am talking about and then possibly finding it somewhere else.

Okay ladies and gentlemen, you heard the tips. Now for the trick. I am not about to reveal to you the secret of secrets (actually I did hear one student say they had heard of this but only one) and for all you entrepreneurial types out there, this your chance; I only ask that you give me a cut. As you know, if you don’t paint everyday, the paint on your palette dries up. Good-bye expensive paint. This will contribute to you using lesser and lesser amounts and then your paintings will go downhill from there. You’ve heard of the saran wrap trick, the freezing trick, well forget freezing and saran wrap. That’s for amateurs.  Now – drum roll please! – here’s the real trick of tricks: keep your paints underwater. That’s right, you’ve heard it here first – probably.

There are many ways of doing this, of course. One way is to use a plastic (plexi) or glass palette and keep the thing in a tray/kitty litter box, and keep the palette under water. When you want to use the palette, just take it out, shake it off and give it a minute to dry. Or, because I like wood palettes, I use a palette knife to scrape off each color onto a strip of plexi (about 3 inches by 20) and then put the strip of plexi into a tube (PVC with cap) filled with water (or in a tray filled with water). Same thing. When I paint again, I pull out the strip of plexi and transfer the paint to my palette. Always fresh and perky (except for the ultramarine blue – don’t know what’s wrong with ultramarine blue pigments, still usable but not so perky).

So go out and buy the best paints that you can afford. And waste not.

To me, the worst thing about writing a blog is that my audience is invisible, largely silent and possibly non-existent. As I sit here and bang out the words, my sense as to whom I’m writing is vague at best. Therefore, it is difficult for me to aim my thoughts or to respond to a specific point of view. Worse, my proclivity, based upon my own learning-to-paint experience, is to probe the insight of someone like Meyer Shapiro (big name scholar! “credited with fundamentally changing the course of the art historical discipline”) who said that the longer he looked at the work of Manet and the Impressionists the more he understood that their accomplishment was “to preserve painting –as a practice, a set of possibilities, a dream of freedom.”

detail of a painting by Monet

Okay, yes, that’s a mouthful to be sure. But hang in there for a moment. I say that my proclivity is “worse” because most of the students who find their way to Lake Como for their “painting holiday” actually do have the concept holiday foremost in their mind. They want to relax and learn a little bit about painting and that often means, as they tell me, something akin to learning new techniques. I inform them, at least from my point of view, that learning to paint has less to do with learning new techniques than it does with learning new ways to be free. For some, a jarring thought; after all, it’s only Sunday evening. It’s the welcoming reception after all. What’s with the freedom talk, their eyes implore. I didn’t sign up for no re-education. I just want to paint a freaking painting.

Alas, my cross to carry. I suppose the inference might be that if one must learn new ways of being free, one is not sufficiently free already. Indeed. But I as I try to make clear, this freedom talk has to do with feeling larger, more powerful. Don’t think re-education, think Bacchus as in how Beethoven believed his music would impact future generations: “Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.” You see, this greater freedom is regenerative. Apart from the possible hangover, it’s quite a pleasant thing.

And, I must confess, this getting free business isn’t quite like putting on a pair of virtual reality goggles either. As Robert Henri reminds us, “To be free, … can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.” Did you catch the word sacrifice? So stop clinging to some of the pillars of thought that define your existence! Okay. I lied. There is a tiny bit of re-education going on here. But you like wine, don’t you?

Last comforting thought: The Impressionists didn’t just go off and paint more freely. Their world was, as they say understatedly, in turmoil. New ways of being and living were being wheeled into place; and for painters new ways of seeing and feeling. The Impressionists, perhaps like Bacchus and Beethoven, were communicating a larger spirituality, a new sense of joy. Not so easy to step across that threshold. The times they were a changing.

I promise: next blog will be fun. It will be called Tips and Tricks!

I wanted to write about Occupy Wall Street  (OWS) and what it means for painters, but before I jump in I thought I would lay some groundwork. The point I would like to make is that art and politics are always intertwined and to be a free artist one must be aware of political and economic forces that might impinge on one’s freedom. But let me come at this subject from a different angle.

Long before the internet got going, it was all the rage for young single men like myself (at the time) to try out the “personal ads.” Pithy, cryptic ads about how wonderful I was. Whoopi! What a challenge!!

I eventually had a response. I called the number and the following conversation ensued: “So what do you do?” “I’m an artist, a painter.” Five minutes later. “So what do you do?” “I’m a painter, an artist.” Minutes more go by. “So what do you really do?”  Sensing that it might be the time to be ruthlessly brutal, I put it right out there, “I’M AN ARTIST!” “Well,” said my prospective date, “I’m thinking of having children, so this is not going to work.” I wanted to tell her that the sperm bank was down the street but decided against adding insult to injury.

The concept of what an artist is has really taken a tumble. I attribute it mostly to the Abstract Expressionists. Well, maybe not to them exactly, but to the people who engineered that movement. It used to be that artists were thought of as worldly. It used to be expected that an artist would take positions on various international events. Think Picasso, unveiling his Guernica at the 1937 World’s Fair. Art movements, rooted in the politics of both the left and right, were steeped in systemic critiques, generally urged social responsibility and advanced prescriptions of the good life. With the construction of Abstract Expressionism, however (in part by means of an insistence on abstraction and thus the elimination of any link to the social-aesthetic art movements of Europe), the tie between art and social activism was severed. Accordingly, many American painters like Adolph Gottlieb, to mention one well-known painter, urged a depoliticized “middle road” (making reference to Arthur Schlesinger’s concept of the period, the “vital center”). American art critic Harold Rosenberg celebrated the “liberation from Value – political, esthetic, moral…The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world.”[1] And quick as wink, a number of ambitious artists, on their way to becoming big time (Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock for example), abandoned representative painting altogether and jumped aboard the abstract bandwagon. Funny how that happens.[2]

So what does this have to do with my personal ad and the OWS? Quite a bit. The need for artists to divorce themselves from social activism, if they were serious about a career, meant that in post-WWII America there would be no fundamental critique of ruling classes coming from the visual art world, no sense that a powerful few run the show, no inveighing against Salon type monopolies, or aristocracies, or bankers or international corporations. There would be no Diego Rivera’s pointing to the dignity of the worker. This was an enormous achievement by America’s ruling class especially as Abstract Expressionism was part and parcel of a burgeoning American empire. In the context of the cold war, there would be no critiques of capitalism (virtually no one would know what it was), just a celebration of individual freedom.

As politics was pushed off stage, psychology was brought in front and center. Good-bye outer landscape. Hello inner landscape. Gone too was the studio of social interaction. Artists were now, especially the good ones, thought of as terribly troubled, inhabiting isolated studios, working through inner conflicts, expressing angst, the indelible sine qua non of true artistry. Jackson Pollock, drunk out of his mind, pissing into fireplaces at dinner parties in the Hamptons? Sheer genius. Bingo. There it is. You have to give that woman on the phone some credit. After all, would you want your daughter to date an artist? Never mind poor. She probably saw herself careening down a highway with an artistic drunk. An early end. No childbirth. Nothing.[3]

French artists of the late 19^th century were also supposed to make the French ruling class look good, to make the terrible inequality of that period not only appear as natural, but as moral, as in a moral order. Many artists, including the Impressionists, refused to play along. They were part of a larger democratic uprising. They felt that only institutional change could ensure their freedom. And so they devised a way to control the exhibition of their work and their aesthetic as well. And here’s the key point: absent a rich understanding of politics, the various critiques that were in the air, and visions of alternative ways of living their lives, both practiced and imagined, they never would have been able to make the contribution that they did. And without the larger social movement and the institutional change it fostered, artists such as Monet, no doubt, would have kept painting. But I doubt very much that Monet would have ever become the Monet he was most.

Note how Monet recalled the experience of participating in prolonged conversations often organized by Manet over the years in cafés with fellow artists, writers, and political activists.

From the first meeting, he invited me to join him every evening in a café of the ‘Batignolles’ where he and his friends would gather to talk at the end of a day spent at their studios. I would meet there Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas – who arrived shortly afterwards from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Emile Zola who was just starting off in the literary world, and a number of others. I would take Sisley, Bazille and Renoir. There was nothing more interesting than these discussions with their perpetual differences of opinion. Our minds and souls were stimulated. We would encourage each other to make unbiased and sincere researches. We would nourish each other with enthusiasm, which had the power to sustain us for weeks on end, until we were able to give definite form to the idea. One would always leave all the better immersed, the will stronger, our thinking more defined and clear.

My teacher’s teacher, Robert Brackman, also expressed gratitude for an immersion into competing political viewpoints. Brackman, when he arrived as an immigrant in New York City early in the 20^th century, studied with both Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Modern School, which was organized by the well-known anarchist Emma Goldman. Noted Brackman:

Henri was a wonderful teacher. He talked about literature, philosophy, and religion as well as art. I also heard Emma Goldman lecture on economics. I used to study everything there. That’s where I got all my education. It made a big impression on me. It made me think.[4]

The separation of the teaching of painting from discussions of politics or literature or philosophy or whatever is entirely artificial and, I would add, harmful to the growth of anyone seeking truly free expression. In order to teach art, one has to be free to move seamlessly across disciplinary boundaries.  In order to make art, one has to be free to “let go of many common and overestimated things” (Henri) such as stale, grade school, thread-bare justifications of power and privilege that also have the effect of limiting what art we make and how we make it.

One last thought: my very first teaching job (in political science) was at Clark University in 1982. I had been assigned a course on American government. However, at the same time I was also involved in a group that was organizing against US intervention in El Salvador. A brilliant new documentary on El Salvador had just come out and in those days such films, wound on big metal reels, were often distributed by activists. I wanted my class to see the film, but because it wasn’t directly related to the subject I was teaching, I felt that I would have to sneak the film into class and make sure that department heads wouldn’t notice. On the chosen day, I purposely walked to my class via a long and circuitous back way, with the big reel half hidden under my coat. But as fate would have it, I ran smack dab into the Chair of the Government Department, one Cynthia Enloe. “What do you have there, Jerry?” I gulped. “It’s a film on El Salvador,” I sheepishly responded. In a rather sweeping movement of her hand, effecting a grand gesture, she said, “Ah…it’s all related.” And with that she was off.

So you see. It’s all related. How else can you possibly connect the dots?

Smart woman, that Cynthia.

Many years ago when I was teaching political science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a young female student (who knew that I painted) asked me, “Is painting like making love”? Quite taken back by the question and not wanting to get into trouble, I quickly and succinctly responded, “No. Whatever gave you that idea?” “That’s what someone told me,” she said.

The truth was, however, I lied. Actually, I had noticed the parallel. Now, don’t get me wrong. Painting is decidedly not sexual or erotic. Not at all. But the process is like most activities that are sensual in nature and that also seem to enrich our self-understanding in some way. Along with making love, we could count dancing for pleasure; spontaneous and visceral conversation; enjoying a dinner with several unexpected and delightful courses; playing tag that ends abruptly but quickly evolves into another directionless game; exploring a new far away city without a destination in mind; going to a concert with friends and perhaps indulging in something that amplifies the experience; being drawn into a jazz improvisation and so on. Note, here, that the etymology of the word “jazz” is rooted in the improvisational nature of the  “call and response” of sexual activity. Notice, also, that all the activities listed above turn both on there being a sensual pleasure, an improvisation of sorts, the sense of always being in the beginning, and the sense of self-actualization or the realization of greater awareness.

We might also better understand these parallels by contrasting the activities listed above with activities that are normally considered as work; that is, as activities that produce goods or services exchanged in a market such as the making of shoes, houses, cars, or the providing of tax filing assistance, counseling of various types, management of one type or another. In these sorts of activity, the value of the activity is measured by the quality of the result – as it is intended to please another or meet some measure. This external measure is the critically important element because it shapes the activity or making process (think of “teaching to the test”). There is always an end point, a finishing, a pre-determined destination or goal. Therefore, when one paints to expressly please another (a grant competition, to supply a gallery that in turn has a particular market niche, to satisfy a commission, or to simply to look for results as one paints in order to meet some pre-conceived notion of success), we can say that the painting process is akin to a production process. This is what I mean by painting pictures.

Back to the making love parallel; let’s probe a little further (not farther, ahem!). Well, for one thing, there is the much coveted sense of oneness; a painter (as Impressionist) is one with nature. There is the mutual vibration as Cézanne points out. The improvisational, sensual call and response of painting informs us that painting, like making love, is exploratory, without, necessarily, a destination. As with painting and making love, the beginning phase is as wonderful as all the following phases that might follow. One need not finish or conclude or execute as in the conquering approach, that everyone finds so odious (at least in theory), known as  “slam bam thank you Mam.” Nor, again in theory, does the scorecard mentality of “how was I?” find acceptance. (I find it odd, however, that so many painters accept, as normal, such grades and measures as Master Artist at the same time they get the joke, “Rembrandt, PhD.”)

Here’s my point: the measure of a painting, as in all other life-giving activities, is the feeling one has as one does the activity, whether it is making love or making a painting. The payoff is always in the moment of expressing, and therefore realizing, one’s feelings. This is the moment of creation. And delightfully, the process creates the work. The painting simply follows, as by-product of the experience.

When painting is reduced simply to making a picture in order to please or win approval, the measure is the evaluation of the result. The payoff is the impact that the evaluation has in one’s position in a hierarchy.

So now the truth can be told. Painting is like making love, at least to a degree. The doing of it ought to feel good and not like the anxiety-producing feeling one gets when one takes a test and then waits to see if the results signify that one is half-way worthy or just a dummy.

Just so you don’t think I’m some old fart from the 60s (as in Timothy Leary’s suggestion that we “turn on, tune in, drop out”), the distinctions outlined above are really old hat. Philosophically, they have formed the basis, at least in certain circles, of determining what might count as a free and fulfilling life for quite some time. One can even go all the way back to Aristotle who distinguished between a general kind of making – the building of a house, let us say – from a kind of making where the actual process of making contributes to a “living well,” to a truly human and free life (which Aristotle called “being” or “doing”).

Now, who would have thunk – a link between Timothy Leary and Aristotle. I wonder if either ever painted.

I wanted to write a bit about the mechanics of painting; but even with the mechanics (or how-to’s), the purpose remains the same: in the exercise of our natural powers, we grow more powerful and are fulfilled. That is the source of the pleasure that drives the process. And it is the process that creates the work.

Let’s talk about how squinting helps us, strange as it may seem, to actually see in a way that enables us to become better painters. By squinting I mean the narrowing of our eyelids so that less light enters our eyes and so that we are unable to focus. Now, here’s the rule: when we look at our subject we squint – always, without exception. I think I can demonstrate why squinting is a necessary and essential part of the process with a few examples. Let’s begin with what is called the “checker shadow illusion.”*

Take a look at the image on the left: you see a checkerboard upon which a cylinder casts a shadow. You will also see two squares, A and B. As it turns out both A and B are identical. They have the same value (that is the same level of lightness or darkness). Now if one looks at the image on the left, square A and B seem to be of different values (A looks darker than B).  But when we isolate squares A and B on the right – without the checkerboard or the cylinder or shadow, we can see easily that they are the same value. So what is going on?

Well, the reason for the “optical illusion” is that square A is surrounded by light squares and thus seems darker. Square B is not only surrounded by darker squares, it is surrounded by darker squares which have a shadow cast over them – thus they are very dark compared to square B. Therefore, when we look casually at the checkerboard, square A seems relatively dark, whereas square B seems relatively light.

The key word here is relatively and the key concept to introduce at this point is called relations. In every single painting, assuming we wish to create a sense of space and that we are painting from nature, we want the values to be properly related; that is, we would like dark things to actually be darker than light things. So here’s the way to do this: SQUINT and compare.  Because we cannot focus when we squint, it is far easier to see the whole thing and compare the values.

Go back to the checkerboard and squint way, way down. All the squares in the shadow become a blur. They are all darkish – very similar in value to square A. So by squinting, we are able to relate the values properly. Now let us take a real world example.

Let’s say we wish to paint the view above on the left. Notice what is inside the red square: a darkish mountain against a lightish sky. Here is where squinting will help us.

If we are not careful we will make the mountain too dark. Just as in the case of square A above, the mountain will look darker than it is because it is next to something much lighter. You can see this value relationship in the image on the right. I have cropped out that square and made it black and white so we can better judge values. The mountain area A is significantly darker than sky area B.

But if we squint, it becomes apparent that mountain area A, while darker than sky area B, is still significantly lighter than the wall area C. If we didn’t squint, it would be difficult to get this relationship.  To see these relationships better, I have inserted a row of blocks into the photo above, each with a different value. On the left side is pure black and on the right is pure white. Notice that area C is nearly black while area A (the mountain) is much lighter. And perhaps surprisingly area B, the sky, isn’t close to white at all.

So it is necessary to squint at all times. Squinting also helps us to relate colors as well. When we see the relationship of values and colors properly, we are in a better position to see the whole and to feel the whole: the harmony as well as the notes of darks and lights that push things toward balance or imbalance, that give the thing movement or not.

Don’t play the notes, play the music – of course. But in order to play the music we must first master the notes and squinting helps us do that.

* If you would like to see the checkerboard optical illusion  and  an attendant explanation, go here:

http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html

The Impressionists were simply the last wave of painters that finally broke the control over painting that aristocrats had held so tightly for hundreds of years. Count de Nieuwekerke, imperial director of the Beaux-Arts, was besides himself when a group of painters, who were in love with the process of painting – that is to say, loved making wonderful marks with a brush as opposed to competing for medals by painting tight (read no brushstrokes) literal scenes of the noble Napoleon or the noble Church leader or the noble aristocrat. “This is the painting of democrats, of those men who do not change their linen and who want to thrust themselves on mundane people: this art displeases and disgusts me.” I don’t know about the changing of their linen, but the first part is absolutely true. Impressionism might best be understood as a democratic uprising. Moreover, the Impressionists, by virtue of their visible brushstrokes, were themselves becoming visible. Indeed, it was they who were becoming the subject of the painting. “That’s a Cassatt or that’s a Cézanne,” observers were apt to say. Good-bye Napoleon and good-bye painting as propaganda.

Robert Henri, in his classic The Art Spirit, actually dedicates several pages to the brushstroke and the feelings they evoke. Here is just a small sample of his descriptions: “There are timid, halting brush strokes…other strokes which inspire a sense of vigor, direction, speed, fullness and all the varying sensations an artist may wish to express. The mere brushstroke itself must speak….It is showy, shallow, mean, meager, selfish, has the skimp of a miser; is rich, full, generous, alive and knows what is going on.”  Henri continues: brushstrokes can be bold, bad, attenuated, weeping, rich, fluent, abundant; there are strokes which mount, carry up, rise, strokes which end too soon, dull strokes and confused strokes, strokes that carry a message, a bigness of spirit, and so on.

As you might well imagine, then, in order for a painter to be able to have his or her brushstroke “speak,” as it were, not only must the painter have something to say (ie, feel) but he or she must have the kind of control over the brush as might a pianist have control over the keys or a violinist over the bow. This requires, in turn, that the brush be held properly so that the flexibility of one’s shoulder and elbow and wrist and fingers all come into play. You can imagine, then, my disappointment when I tuned into a BCC program on the Impressionists and at the very beginning, as inviting music played in the background, an actor could be seen painting what was supposed to be the Japanese Footbridge at Giverny. The painting that the actor was working on was the typical fake-y Impressionist style that gives Impressionism such a bad name today. There were lots of stupid, boring, repetitive dabs (paraphrasing Henri, sort of). And the color was equally as phony, lacking entirely any atmospheric harmony. Who’s to know, right? (Least of all the experts behind the production.) But the part that nearly made me want to puke was the way the actor was holding the brush. It reminded me of my chagrin as a youth when actors cast as major league baseball stars couldn’t convincingly throw a ball. I mean, how inspiring is that?

After all, if a great painter is suppose to evoke rich and full and generous and alive strokes, you would think he or she would know how to hold a brush. Okay, see for yourself. Here it is:

Does this bug you? Actually, the whole reason for posting this is that I suspect it may not bug you one bit, so let me explain.

The BBC actor is holding the brush the way one might hold a hammer, with all his fingers wrapped around the handle. Yes, to be sure, in the image on the left, the baby finger is held out in a delicate manner and in the image on the right, the forefinger is extended a bit, suggesting finesse but in this type of “pawing,” or “clawing,” or “tapping” or “smearing,” there is limited ability to use one’s wrist. It is as though the wrist had been amputated.

Let me show you the way real painters hold the brush: