On Painting

Electric Objects

2015-05-02T12:41:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I wrote an essay (Painting and Algorithms) about the effects computers might have on painting and the arts in the coming years. Specifically, I compared the impact algorithms will have on painting to the impact photography has had on it since the 19th century. One prediction I made was that advances in screen technology would bring wireless ultra HD screens that you will hang on your wall like a picture frame. These screens, I predicted, would eventually be more like Kindle screens than LED screens (no glare or unnatural glow) and that the images would be so detailed that the texture of the painting could be discerned and perhaps even fool the eye. I also thought the business model for attaining such high res images would be something akin to Netflix (I called it Artflix.) Well, it looks as though the first substantial step is about to be taken by a startup I've had my eye on since they did their Kickstarter. Their name is Electric Objects and they make a no-nonsense screen that is connected to the internet. They emphasize that it isn't a computer-- it will not be full of menus and distractions. They market it as a screen for long looking, not the restless glances that the internet tends to cultivate.

The Verge has a good overview of what they want to do:

For internet addicts, a gadget to help you slow down and savor

A couple of quotes from the article:

But the thing I enjoyed about the EO1 was that it found the right medium between the web and analog eras. Instead of entering the intimidating and often expensive world of galleries, I can browse through the app for original artwork or uploads from community members. The software has the sparse look of a minimalist Tumblr feed, offering you the choice to bookmark art you like or display it on your device. It won't, however, set the images to rotate through a slide show, and there are no notifications when a new work is available. You choose the piece, and it just stays there, slowly seeping into your brain. "It’s been a slightly unusual experience because you don’t normally buy electronics for them to just sit there," said Graham Hicks, a product designer living in San Francisco and EO1 beta tester. Hicks studied industrial design and worked on digital products at IDEO, Square, and Prismatic. He was never a real art collector but always loved a good museum. "There’s always buttons to push or menus to explore. But with EO1 there’s just the choice of what to display, what you want to look at today. And that shifts your focus to the art itself rather than device."

Also:

The animated pieces, changing subtly over time, were equally entrancing to my two-year-old son and 65-year-old father. Adding to the sense that the device was alive, the screen also dealt well with the shift between day and night, appearing more like a paper canvas when exposed to sunlight and offering a strong glow at night. At first I was tempted to change the image multiple times a day. But slowly my metabolism moved to match the more contemplative mood of the device.

And here comes Artflix:

The idea of paying for fine art, or treating it like an investment vehicle as so many wealthy buyers now do, scares me. Electric Objects hopes to keep things simple, aligning with the business users are familiar with from their streaming video and music services. "We will probably start with the Netflix model where a subscription gets you access to all the original artwork," says Jake Levine, the company's CEO.

I don't know that this will be the specific screen to cause significant shifts in how people view and buy art, but I do think it is the beginning.

On Painting and Algorithms

2011-04-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

With an apple I will astonish Paris

Paul Cezanne

If you wanted to paint an apple in the manner of Cezanne, you would need to have an extensive knowledge of his work and a strong sense of his aesthetic intentions. Every brushstroke would need to be accompanied by the question, “what would Cezanne do?” You might stop frequently to refer to his paintings to see how he handled certain visual situations. As your painting progressed you would gradually develop perhaps a dozen general stylistic guidelines for yourself. These guidelines would be instructions along the lines of “when you see this, do this.” Of course, much of the process would be based on wordless intuition; a vague sense of when a group of marks looked “Cezanne-esque.”

On a basic level, this is not unlike a how a computer algorithm works. An algorithm is "a finite sequence of instructions, logic, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, often used for calculation and data processing and many other fields." It acts as a kind of flow chart which guides a computer through a series of evaluations and decisions. When translating, say, a Shakespeare sonnet from one language to another, a computer will use an algorithm to evaluate and substitute words and phrases into the other language. This is called “gisting” because computers are still not capable of making a translation that is much more than 80% accurate—for all their processing power, computers have a difficult time processing the complexities and nuances of contextual meaning. In art of literary translation there are no clear-cut right or wrong rules for choosing a phrase that means the same thing in one language as it does in another and that keeps the same rhythmic or emotional characteristics. From Wikipedia on the art of translation:

Fidelity (or faithfulness) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French critic coined the phrase les belles infidèles to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.

Here is a Shakespeare sonnet translated from German into English by a computer program:

I am to compare one summer day you, which you

lovelier and moderate are? Mays expensive buds

drehn in the impact of the storm, and is all too short

summer period.

You get a general idea of the what the words mean but the poetry is missing. The best a computer can strive for is faithful-- beautiful, for the time being, is out of the question.

In painting a Cezannesque apple you would, in essence, be acting as a kind of translator. Specifically you would be trying to translate one visual language (Nature’s) into another’s (Cezanne’s.) Or, in Photoshop parlance, you would be acting as a Cezanne filter.

There are no Cezanne filters that I am aware of but there are, of course, the increasingly ubiquitous art filters that use algorithms to manipulate o imitate a film type or fine art media. Interestingly, in the 1800s a number of photographers attempted to make their photos look more like paintings by manipulating the development process to achieve painterly effects— an analog version of an algorithmic photo filter. Computer applications can be quite sophisticated in terms of there ability to mimic natural media like oil paint or watercolor-- both in terms their appearance and their working properties. There are also more and more programs now that attempt to mimic specific styles of painting like, say, Impressionism or Pointillism. You feed the program a photo and it spits out an "impressionistic" version of it. The results are almost always very bad. Like language translation, art filters are far too simplistic to handle the contextual/aesthetic complexities of painting. It is hard enough for a human to define what a good painting is, much less write an algorithm that can define it for an unthinking computer.

But computers are getting more powerful and algorithms more sophisticated. Massive databases of information can now be accessed so quickly, and patterns discerned so efficiently, that a computer can appear to be sentient like when IBMs supercomputer named "Watson" competed against two Jeopardy champions. The computer had access to 200 million pages of information that consisted of raw data like encyclopedias and dictionaries, books, news, movie scripts etc. It was not connected to the internet or guided by any human helpers. As with most computers, Watson’s weakness is the inability to understand the nuances of speech and language or to have any life experiences to draw upon to devine answers, but scientists alleviated these problems by loading the data onto the computer’s RAM rather than the hard drive which made searches much more quick and nimble. Algorithms were then designed to take advantage of this increased speed to find subtle patterns and probabilities inside the mountain of data. So Watson listened to Alex Trebeck, rang the buzzer, and answered in the form of a questio all without human intervention. Watson won.

Another interesting example is a program called “Emmy” designed by David Cope, a professor at UC Santa Cruz. Cope was having trouble finishing an opera commission so he designed a program that could emulate the work of several great composers to help spur his thinking. Emmy uses an algorithm to find patterns in a great composer’s music and then uses that information to piece together the composer’s style and create a new composition. When an audience was asked to listen to an Emmy-created Bach composition and a real Bach composition, they could not tell the difference. An argument could made that the “new” compositions are merely derivative and so not new at all, but couldn’t the same be said of human composers? As Picasso once said, “good artists copy, great artists steal.”

At the University of Georgia, Gil Weinberg designed a robot, named Shimon, that can interact with other musicians and also, supposedly, play and improvise like Thelonious Monk.

From NPR:

Weinberg programmed Shimon to play like Thelonious Monk. He says that, though he and his team were trying to teach the robot to play like a machine, they first had to teach it how a human plays. To do that, they used statistics and analysis of Monk's improvisation. Once they had a statistical model of the pianist, they could program the robot to improvise in that model.

Weinberg says the robot won't play everything exactly like the bebop pianist — or any other jazz master — would, though he says, "It probably will keep the nature and the character of [the musician's] style."

"It's difficult to predict exactly what they would do in every single moment in time," he says. "But our algorithm pretty much looks at the past several notes that it plays and, based on that, it sees what is the probability of the next note to be, based on all of this analysis of a large corpus of transcribed improvisation."

Here’s a video of Shimon playing.

I think it is likely that in the near future there will be a painterly version of Emmy, Watson or Shimon that can digitally paint in the manner of an artist by analyzing an enormous database of that artist’s work and perhaps even the work of those who influenced him. The output will vary in quality, of course, and depend a great deal on the appropriateness of the input, but I’d guess that at least some of the resulting images will be quite convincing. Also, it is not hard to imagine that in 5 or 10 years, display screens will be capable of displaying images that, from a few feet away, are virtually indistinguishable from real paintings. Perhaps they will be like the Kindle screen, except able to reproduce millions (billions?) of colors and a have a resolution that not only reproduces the details (think of the Google Art Project) of the depicted image but also accurately conveys the texture, sheen and depth of the brushstrokes. This screen would likely be very thin, light and easy to hang on a wall. It would also be fairly inexpensive and have a battery life of months rather than hours or days. And, as an aside, maybe there will be a company called “Artflix” rather than “Netflix” whereby one could download an ultra-high resolution image of a great painting (I suppose the company would have to work out some kind of revenue sharing system with the museums and galleries that owned the rights to those paintings— like iTunes did with the music labels.) You could rent a Vermeer for a week.

paint-by-numbers

We all act as filters to some extent. Our minds edits incoming signals (photons don't have color, for instance-- we assign them colors via rods and cones) These are primal algorithms over which we have very little control (we do not have a choice to see in black and white.) The human algorithms I am referring to are those decision matrices we use by choice in course of a painting-- processes, techniques and methods that we learned in our training and practice. In one sense they help us build our paintings by freeing us up to focus on the larger idea of what we want to express. In a painter's formative years he borrows algorithms because emulation is one way a painter learns from other painters. Borrowed algorithms serve as temporary bridges that allow him to cross artistic waters he may not have the experience or knowledge to navigate by himself. As he practices he slowly develops his own. However, an algorithm can devolve into a habit of sorts if a habit is defined as an automatic reaction to a specific situation. Painters are tempted to rely on such habits because they allow them to avoid the risk inherent in painting and thus mitigate the struggle. The quest for a technique or method often turns into a quest for shortcuts— that is, the successful deployment of a technique or style becomes an end in itself. The larger thought or idea that style or method was supposed to serve gets lost in the pursuit of risk-avoidance and efficiency. A kind of analog version of an algorithmic filter is the paint-by numbers painting system. In paint-by-numbers, one is presented with an image divided up into numbered sections, with each number assigned a color. You paint each section with the corresponding color. If one designed a PBN system using thousands of colors and thousands of sections and perhaps added other parameters like degrees of softness to edges or types of brushstrokes (thick or then, fats or slow etc), the end result might appear to be quite sophisticated and intricate. Add a few more subtle variations and a painter could come to believe he was following his own muse rather than a set of instructions. The whole purpose of paint-by-numbers is to make painting a pleasurable, soothing experience like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It takes patience and some skill but your path is made plain and you know what the results are going to be beforehand. The painting is a foregone conclusion, no matter it’s complexity, and the smell of paint belies the fact that the painter is simply being a computer running an algorithm.

An example of efficiency in painting taken to an extreme can be found in the art factories of China. Sixty percent of the world’s mass produced, cheap oil painting copies come from one small town (1.5 square miles) in China, called Dafen. A worker there can produce a couple of dozen copies a day by hand and it is estimated that 5 million paintings are produced in Dafen every year. There are assembly lines too, as described in The Economist:

Dafen—and other villages like it—are bringing the factory assembly-line into the artist's studio. In a dimly lit hall on the outskirts of Dafen, “painter workers” stand side by side dabbing colours onto canvas. Liu Chang Zhen, a 27-year-old, works eight hours a day to complete more than 200 canvases a month—painting several copies of a picture at a time, methodically filling in the same patch on each before moving to a new part. At other factories, painters work on the same product, but specialize in different parts—in ears or hands or trees. They work from art books, postcards and images from the internet. Sometimes they just paint inside an outline copied electronically from a photograph, enlarged and stamped on the blank canvas.

These workers are trained to be, first and foremost, efficient. They find the quickest, easiest way to complete a technique so that it can be repeated without much thought. Apparently there is little pretense among the workers that this is high art, but workers do take pride in the specific skills required. In Dafen, for instance, there are regular art competitions where several dozen workers compete to see who can complete a copy (or a “replica” as they are referred to) of a masterpiece the fastest and most accurately. It is art as sport.

I am sure one day robots, using algorithms and printers (or perhaps using real brushes and paints) will replace these assembly line workers just as robots replaced many workers in industrial factories here. Looking at this medical robot, called Da Vinci, it is not hard to imagine it manipulating a brush. Low level, repetitive jobs are always the ones that technology targets and replaces first. "Low-level" is always being defined up:

Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field. Twenty-seven Colonials came to the plate and the Virginia pitcher vanquished them all, pitching a perfect game. He struck out 10 batters while recording his momentous feat. Roberts got Ryan Thomas to ground out for the final out of the game. Tom Gately came up short on the rubber for the Colonials, recording a loss. He went three innings, walked two, struck out one, and allowed two runs. The Cavaliers went up for good in the fourth, scoring two runs on a fielder's choice and a balk.

The above excerpt was written by a computer program that writes local sports stories using just the statistics from the game as a source.

Every painter experiences moments when he feels as though he is just filling in the numbers. The mind drifts and the algorithms take over. For too many painters this is a desirable and sought-after state because it is taken as a sign of skillfulness— an ease that comes from many hours of practice. But we have all seen paintings that are skillfully, even beautifully done, yet something is missing. It is as though the painter knew what his painting was going to look like before he started and did not allow any room for variations or tangential discoveries. There is no risk, no probing, no investigation, no surprise. No curiosity.

Here is a quote from a lecture given by David Breswick from the Center for Applied Educational Research, University of Melbourne, where he discusses the nature of curiosity:

The highly curious person will have a high regard for the uniqueness of the signal and for the integrity of the cognitive map, and so will be loathe to either assimilate or accommodate. He or she will seek the best possible fit, and typically that will require seeking additional information to build a suitable new integration of the incoming information with what was known before. So questions will be asked, calculations might be made, things will be turned over and looked under, there may well be much wondering and doubting, but after the ball has been kept bouncing for a sufficient length of time some sort of resolution will be reached in which sufficient accommodation occurs for the conceptual conflict to be resolved. The result is that a new order of representation of the world is developed.

He goes on:

To continue with the characteristics of highly curious people, I like to think of curiosity as belonging at the border between chaos and cosmos, so highly curious people will remain longer than others in situations of uncertainty, as well as being more likely to be there, that they will have developed a range of investigative skills to help resolve conceptual conflicts by gathering additional information, that they will have a sufficient sense of security in their world to put their cognitive map in jeopardy without debilitating anxiety, to run the risk of creating a new and better order, and that they will have the capacity to carry out the integration required to create a sense of cosmos where there was the threat of chaos. That is, they will be able, typically, and more than most people, to create, maintain, and resolve conceptual conflicts.

Curiosity is a quality more often associated with scientists than artists, but all the good painters I know are exceedingly curious. They like to “peel the onion” in that they peel away one layer of understanding in a painting so as to reveal another and another and so on. In so doing they learn to become comfortable with being lost in a painting; of not knowing what to do. Scientists are quite comfortable in this state of unknowing because it is where they spend most of their time. They have a “notion about the cosmos” that they then must test with experiments. The results, invariable, will lead him, or someone else, to further questions, theories and experiments. And so the onion is peeled. Paintings should be experiments too. Not in the sense of self-consciously trying to create something new or cutting-edge, but rather in the sense of being open to new possibilities as each painting develops.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog on making movies:

Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix... If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch.

and:

Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life.

Painterly, to me, does not mean a painting with thick paint or bravura brushwork. It means a painting that is cultivated and allowed to grow in it’s own way. This is difficult to do because it requires that we wander into unknown territory where we have no rules to guide us and thus we are forced to make our own. This is where it is tempting to unthinkingly use “off-the-shelf” solutions, a ready-made pieces of "code" that we can insert into our painting to help us deal with an edge or a shape or composition that doesn’t seem to work. We ask, “What would so and so do?” or we reach for some well-worn solution of our own instead of exploring other possibilities or refinements. We have instant access to more painters and paintings than anytime in history. This is, by and large, a good thing but it can also be quite inhibiting because that means, at any point in a painting, we can peruse and find a number of solutions to whatever painting problem we are working on. Malraux wrote,"The poet is haunted by a voice with which words must be harmonized." Today it is a million voices.

My reason for discussing such technology is not to sound an alarm about computers replacing painters but rather to study and perhaps become more sensitive to those moments when we become computers. No, the computer will not make painting obsolete anymore than photography did, but I do believe it will be disruptive. Much of what we see now in terms of painting and computers is in it’s infancy and, like most technology, when it first starts out it can appear simplistic and even silly. However, it did not take long for photography to become the de facto way to record visual facts and as cameras grew smaller, cheaper and more efficient it became evident: if your job as a painter was to merely paint facts, your equal became a box with a pinhole in it. Similarly, now, if your mission as a painter is to merely follow a set of visual rules (“when you see this, paint this”) then your equal will soon be a piece of silicon. Photography started an ongoing conversation about what painting is and what it should be and I believe computers will soon rekindle this conversation.

Cezanne had a unique goal in mind for what his painting should be and so he had to find unique solutions. Frankly, I don’t understand how Cezanne did what he did. I don’t know how he made an apple seem so dense and heavy and tangible. Obviously it has something to do with his deliberate marks, his use of color and strong edges and the way he structured his compositions and his perspective, but the traditional building blocks of rendering volume and weight don’t quite explain it. I’m not sure even Cezanne could explain it. Cezanne’s technique and style came as a result of the pursuit of his goal, a goal that was maybe, to him, beyond his technical ability or perhaps even his full understanding (he felt that he failed to reach it.)

In the opening paragraph of Cezanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:

It took him one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred- fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, an attempt, an approach to painting. In September of 1906, at the age sixty-seven—one month before his death—he wrote: "I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive.... Now it seems I am better that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued? I am working from nature, and it seems to me I am making slow progress”. Painting was his world and his mode of existence. He worked alone without students, without admiration from his family, without encouragement from the critics. He painted on the afternoon of the day his mother died. In 1870 he was painting at l'Estaque while the police were after him for dodging the draft. And still he had moments of doubt about this vocation. As he grew old, he wondered whether the novelty of his painting might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of his body. The hesitation or muddle-headedness of his contemporaries equaled this strain and doubt. "The painting of a drunken privy cleaner," said a critic in 1905. Even today, C. Mauclair finds Cezanne's admissions of powerlessness an argument against him. Meanwhile, Cezanne's paintings have spread throughout the world. Why so much uncertainty, so much labor. so many failures, and, suddenly, the greatest success?

Several years ago I read a lovely metaphor for how an artist develops a way of painting. I cannot seem to find it online anymore and I don't recall who wrote it. Anyway, it went something like this: The Nautilus is born in a small shell that has seven chambers. As the nautilus feeds and grows it adds a new chamber, slightly larger than the last, to accommodate its new size. This growth continues until death (on average twenty years later.) At the end of its life the nautilus leaves behind an extraordinarily precise architecture that is as beautiful as it is strong. The Nautilus did not set out to make a beautiful shell-- the shell formed as a result of the nautilus living its life.

On "Las Meninas" by Diego Velazquez

2008-07-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

After many years of studying Las Meninas from afar, I finally got a chance to see it in person. In January of this year I went to the Prado in Madrid with my teacher, Ray Berry, who introduced me to the work of Velazquez in undergraduate school. This was his second time seeing Las Meninas, the first time being a couple of decades ago. I suppose this was a pilgrimage of sorts-- in addition to seeing the painting I think we wanted to pay our respects to a painter who had an enormous influence on how Ray and I think about paint and painting. Velazquez is a painter's painter and most every painter I know reveres him regardless of their pedigree or style of painting. Las Meninas is, by all accounts, Velazquez's masterpiece. Visits to the painting are often described in sacred terms-- apparently you don't just look at Las Meninas, you experience it. Since its completion in 1656, Las Meninas has maintained an almost mythic status, and enthusiasm for the painting has come from an unusually broad swath of disciplines-- Leo Steinberg wrote, "the literature on Las Meninas is an epitome of recent thinking about illusionism and the status of art...a cherished crux for modern investigators, for geometricians, metaphysicians, artist-photographers, semioticians, political and social historians and even rare lovers of art." On the flight to Madrid, I wondered whether the Las Meninas in the Prado would live up to the Las Meninas in my mind. It did.

So after a long and predictably miserable airline experience, we settled into our hotel rooms. We walked down the narrow streets of Las Cortes district to the Prado and to the large Velazquez room which has Las Meninas as its centerpiece. We made our way to the front of the small crowd gathered around it and got our first look.

I've included a couple of visual aids so that you can easily refer to the various passages of Las Meninas that I discuss. One is a Flash slide show which contains several detail images, and the other is a single large image of Las Meninas. I recommend opening each link in a separate window so that you don't have to switch back and forth between my writing and the images:

FLASH SLIDE SHOW (click on the thumbnails at the bottom of the slide show screen to advance images according to the ones referenced throughout the text.) You probably already have a flash player installed on your computer but if you don't, you can download one here.

If for some reason the flash slide show doesn't work, then just go to this page to view a static listing of the slides

HIGH RES IMAGE of Las Meninas (click on the image to enlarge)

At this point I thought it might be helpful to include a brief primer on the painting:

A menina is a "lady-in-waiting."

The painting is about ten feet high and we know the name of every person depicted in it. We see Velazquez on the left working on a similarly-sized canvas with brush and palette in hand, looking in our direction. A menina (Maria Agustina Sarmiento) crouches down to offer a refreshment to the Infanta Margarita who reaches for the small jug as she looks toward us. To the right of Margarita is another menina (Isabel de Velasco) and behind her is a senior-lady-in-waiting (Marcela de Ulloa) dressed in mourning clothes (she was recently widowed) and talking to a guardadamas (a chaperone.) Further right is a dwarf (Mari-Barbola) and to the right of her is a male midget (Nicolasito Pertusato) who nudges Philip's mastiff with his foot (the dog was, apparently, an excellent sitter for portraits.) In the back we see the Queen's chamberlaine (Jose Nieto) looking on and in the mirror we see the image of Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Austria. A window to our right lights the scene.

On the face of it, this is a behind-the-scenes view of a family portrait in the making, but as you look more deeply some fundamental questions arise which in turn raise further questions: Is Velazquez, as seen in the painting, making a portrait of the King and Queen, of the Infanta Margarita, or all three (maybe the Infanta is taking a break from posing with the royal couple?) It has been theorized that the dog was Phillip's personal Spanish mastiff (who use to follow him around the palace) so perhaps the King has just finished watching Velazquez work on his daughter's portrait and is now about to leave-- thus Nicolasito nudges the dog to wake up. Who is everyone looking at-- us (the viewer) or the King? Are we looking through the King's eyes? Is the image in the mirror of the King and Queen (see slide 1) a direct reflection of them or is it a reflection of their painted image on the canvas that Velazquez is working on? And just what is on the canvas that Velazquez is working on-- is it an different portrait of the royal couple or is it Las Meninas? It is a wonderful mystery; a visual riddle that never quite resolves itself-- a reflection of a reflection of a reflection and down you go down the rabbit hole. Leo Steinberg equated Las Meninas to an encounter, "... the picture conducts itself the way a vital presence behaves. It creates an encounter. And, as in any living encounter, any vital exchange, the work of art becomes the opposite pole in a situation of reciprocal self-recognition. If the picture were speaking instead of flashing, it would be saying: I see you seeing me--I in you see myself seen-- see you seeing yourself being seen--and so on beyond the reaches of grammar."

When I first saw it I didn't think about the paint, or the composition, or the narrative. The "art" disappeared and in place of it there was, as Steinberg wrote, an odd sense of being seen and in turn seeing back. Really. I'm not exaggerating. It is a strangely visceral experience. My initial impression was that I was looking through the King's eyes (seen reflected in the mirror on the back wall) at the scene before me and thus making me a participant and a bystander at the same time (like in the movie Being John Malkovich.) It is almost startling in the same way watching a play from the front row of a small theater can be startling when an actor happens to look directly at us as he speaks a line-- for a brief moment we believe the actor is conversing with us. You might assume this odd sensation comes from the simple fact that the subjects are looking toward us as though we had interrupted the portrait session and the mirror, in essence, includes us in the composition. But there is something more happening here, a shock of reality; a hyper-representation that can't be explained by compositional devices alone. Velazquez creates a palpable air that surrounds the subjects, the room they inhabit, and even us. This is where reproductions fail miserably because much of this gets lost in translation. When you stand before all ten feet of Las Meninas there is a sense of ones eyes being "activated" to react as they do when seeing something in real life rather than in a painting. It is difficult to isolate what, exactly, is causing this but I have a few ideas.

In Las Meninas I believe Velazquez exaggerated or "goosed" the natural inclination of our eyes to view things conically. We have a cone of vision that is clearest toward the center and softer toward the outside (our peripheral vision.) There is a cone of vision that surrounds the infanta and extends out to include the menina kneeling down to her, as well as the standing menina to the her immediate right and left. Outside of that cone of sharpness the figures are painted differently-- the forms are slightly softer. I should point out that when I say the forms are softer I do not mean they are blurred in the photographic sense. Our peripheral vision is not blurred. Blurring is really just a symbol or stand-in for peripheral vision, though it is a close enough approximation of it (and depth of field) that we interpret it as such. Part of this softness is because Velazquez is representing figures in shadow, yet the dwarf and the midget are well into the light and their features are clearly less defined (see slide 2.) The effect is subtle-- obviously if he simply sharpened the Infanta and smeared everything else in some formulaic manner, the peripheral forms would fall apart when looked at directly. This is clearly not the case.

There is movement in Las Meninas too. Not prolonged, animated movement but flickers of movement-- the dwarf nudging the Phillip's mastiff as his hands rise up slightly for balance. The menina dropping down, her left hand bending up slightly as she asks or pleads with a slightly defiant (or perhaps distracted) Infanta Margarita whether she wants the red vase; the man in the back pulling back the curtain, the senior lady-in-waiting talking with her hands, the midget looking up as she brings her thumb and forefinger together, and Velazquez with his brush as he bends to see around the canvas. Heads turn and eyes glance toward us. The only person completely still is the chaperone in the shadow and the King and Queen in the mirror. I sense that even the dog is moving slightly as he is being awakened with the nudge. Part of the sensation of movement comes from the characters being precisely posed, but it is enhanced by the paint application. We are strangely adept at interpreting paint, even in the abstract, so a quick flick of paint can imply movement and a slow mark can imply stillness. We know fast paint when we see it and we instinctively associate it with movement. Lively paint in other words, can be a kind of animation because its looseness conveys change and impermanence -- because the paint breathes the subjects breath. There are no passages in Las Meninas where the paint is precious or static-- there are no heavy glazes or overly-caressed chirascura (see slide 3) and he never seems to lose touch with the texture of the canvas surface (see slide 4.) A lesser painter would have polished and smoothed and glazed Las Meninas to make it fashionably finished and would have unknowingly killed it in the process. Las Meninas feels like an improvisation-- but a perfect improvisation, a preparatory oil sketch that required no finished version. Indeed, the evidence indicates that Velazquez just dived in, probably starting with a quick sketch made with thinned paint. X-rays reveal several small pentimenti he made along the way-- you can see one of them if you look at the standing leg of the Nicloasito where there is a shadowy shape of a previously painted leg. A nice example of how Velazquez works can be seen in one of his unfinished paintings (see slide 5.) Notice how quickly he gets to the heart of the matter in her right hand. Her pinky finger is a simple dash or two of paint. To Velazquez, painting and drawing happen at the same time.

An important aspect of the painting that also gets lost in reproductions is the texture of the paint and the canvas underneath, and the role they both play in creating a sense of air around the subjects. In general, if you place a thin patch of paint on a canvas and then add a thick stroke of paint on top of it, the thick paint will seem to come forward while the thin paint will recede (the same goes for sharp and soft edges-- sharp comes forward, soft recedes) and thus we cannot help but sense space between the two marks, a distance that sinks into the canvas. Look, for instance, at the edge of Margarita's dress and the slightly thinner paint behind it (slide 6.) In effect, air is created between the two. There are many passages in Las Meninas where there is this subtle pushing and pulling of paint-- "half-gram poems of paint" to paraphrase Louis Finkelstein in one of his essays on painting. In reproductions the ceiling area and shadowed background space often seems muddy and dead, but there is a slight sheen to the paint/varnish and, when the texture of the canvas (which is revealed because the paint is thin) is scraped by the museum lighting, it reads as almost smoky or atmospheric. One of Ray's observations was that there seems to be a box of air that extends out in front of the canvas which envelopes the viewer and so the ceiling covers us as well as the royal family. Velazquez is including us in the painting.

Ray and I spent many hours (and many drinks) in various bars around The Prado talking about Las Meninas and how it came to be and why it still resonates so profoundly. One's mind sinks into Las Meninas. It is hard not to create a narrative around it or to feel a connection to the people depicted. I imagine Velazquez and Philip were close friends (or as close as a King could be with a painter) and that in Las Meninas they conspired to make a great painting for themselves and for Spain. I've read that depicting a painter with the royal family was highly unusual. It is possible that this was a way for the King to impart to Velazquez a degree of noble status and reward him for his service to Spain. The family entourage must have been thrilled to be playing such a rare prominent role in a royal portrait by the great Velazquez. (like getting a small part in a Spielberg movie today.) I envision the children occasionally sneaking into the studio to watch how they were being immortalized. Indeed, it is known that Philip visited the work in progress quite frequently.

Las Meninas is rich and complex and can be about many things but I can't help but think that it is mostly about family and remembering. I have a wall of family photographs in my house, some old some new. From time to time I try to remember details of the moments depicted: who took this picture? Which wedding were we at when it was taken? When? Who is that in the background? What was going on in my life then? These old snapshots become part of a ritual of remembering or, perhaps, of not forgetting. I can imagine Las Meninas as serving, to some degree, a similar purpose for Philip. Here is Margarita (whom he referred to in letters as his "joy") among the people he saw most often in his daily life and perhaps the people he knew best. They are not in a formal setting or in an artificially official pose, but rather we see them without a royal veneer: a family being a family (I can picture Velazquez and Philip discussing, with some amusement, which mannerism or expression to include in the painting that would most accurately represent each person.) Nobody is really sure why, but for ten years prior to Las Meninas Philip did not sit for a portrait. It has been theorized that the for a time he was in mourning over the death of his first wife, Elisabeth of Bourbon, and two years later the death of his son, Baltasar Carlos. Letters also indicate that he was sensitive about being portrayed as an aging king. Whatever the reason, he must had some sense of fragility, of things changing. Spain, after years of constant war, was in decline. I imagine that for Philip the time depicted in Las Meninas was a relative sweet spot in his life and a time he wanted to remember during the inevitable changes to come. Velazquez died a few years after Las Meninas was completed and several years later Philip would be planning and preparing Margarita to be married off to King Leopold I of Austria (a year after Philip's death, Maragarita was on her way to Austria.) A year before Velazquez's death, Philip awarded him the Order of Santiago which we see represented as a red cross on Velazquez's chest. It is said that Philip, upon Vleazquez's death, painted the cross into Las Meninas himself. In the margin of an official correspondence dealing with choosing Velazquez's successor, Philip wrote, "I am crushed."

From the day it was finished, Las Meninas resided in Philip's private office until his death in 1665. I can imagine Philip looking up at it often and remembering.

a postscript- you may be curious to know, as I was, what happened to Margarita in a "where are they now?" kind of way. Here is a blurb from Wikipedia:

In the summer of 1666, the fifteen-year-old Spanish infanta left Spain and traveled with several Spanish attendants to Austria, where she was solemnly welcomed by Leopold I. Their wedding took place in Vienna on 5 December 1666. Despite the difference in their ages and Leopold's unattractive appearance, the couple were very happy together since they shared a number of interests, especially theatre and music. She called him "Uncle" (even after they were married); he called her "Gretl".

One of the most outstanding events during their reign was the splendid performance of the opera Il pomo d'oro ("The golden apple") by the Italian composer Marco Antonio Cesti in order to celebrate Margaret Theresa's seventeenth birthday in July 1668. This magnificent performance is frequently considered as the peak of the Baroque opera in Vienna during the seventeenth century.

After giving birth to six children and weakened by many miscarriages, Margarita Teresa died at the age of twenty-one — leaving Leopold heartbroken. Her only surviving child was the Archduchess Maria Antonia.

And here are a couple of paintings of her-- the first one was done a few years after Las Meninas and was painted by Velazquez (Ray aptly described her as looking like a puff pastry.) The second portrait was painted by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo who depicted her in mourning dress in the year of her Father's death.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

2008-02-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

As I continue writing my blog entry about Las Meninas (coming soon,) I thought I'd write about my visit to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which sits about a block from The Prado. I'm embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Thyssen-Bornemisza before my visit to Madrid. I'm embarrassed because it is one of the most fascinating collections of painting I have ever seen. If anyone wants to get a sense of the evolution of painting, of artists pushing, toppling and building upon foundations of painting through the centuries, then this is the place to go. It reminded me that the well-manicured "isms" of art history fail to give an accurate sense of the experimentation and play that occurs in the studio. The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection allows room for the art historical orphan, a painting that doesn't quite fit within an artist's prescribed "style" of painting (I found myself saying "so and so painted that?" several times.) Every room seemed to have a miraculous gem of a painting that we had never seen before.

The collection is beautifully presented on colored walls in airy, comfortable rooms. It is organized so that there is a natural flow from one room to another along an historical time line of painting. And unlike many museums, the layout is intuitive-- I looked at a map maybe once the whole time I was there.

It is an astounding collection of work.

They also have an excellent web site (and make sure you check out the cool virtual tour.)

Van Gogh

Matisse

Madrid and Las Meninas

2008-01-04T05:37:00.000-08:00

I'm off to Madrid next week. I'm taking a pilgrimage of sorts to see The Prado and what is arguably one of the greatest paintings ever painted, "Las Meninas." I figure being a painter and not seeing "Las Meninas" is a little like being a Yankees fan and not seeing a game at Yankee Stadium.

I'm taking with me the guy who first introduced me to the work of Velazquez, my teacher Ray Berry. I'll be leaving my paints at home as I will need to pack light to better survive what will likely be an ugly airline experience, so no paintings will be posted next week.

When I return I'll post an account of my trip. Meanwhile, if you want to read a little about "Las Meninas," an OK place to start is here.

Whistler at The Freer Gallery

2007-12-31T15:18:00.000-08:00

I saw a beautiful exhibition of Whistler's small oil paintings at the Freer Gallery in Washington DC last week. The show consists of about 25 paintings (seascapes, landscapes, figures) that average about 4 x 7 inches in size. They seem to be mostly plein air and, according to a couple of different sources, were probably done on a cigar box type easel. Whistler's small oil paintings don't seem to get much attention from art historians and they lack the blockbuster draw of his more well-known work. From the standpoint of the viewer, however, this is a good thing because you can see these gems without the crowd.

This is a quiet, contemplative show. Physically the paintings are exquisitely delicate and spare, bordering on the austere. There are passages where Whistler seems to allow the milky paint to almost puddle in place, into a cloud here, a wave there, like a watercolorist. I’m guessing they are a conservator's nightmare (as thin as the paint is, you almost feel like you need to step softly in the gallery so as not to shake the paint off the panels.) The color is subdued, though not dull. Whistler can make a bluish gray seem a shocking blue simply by how he arranges the notes of color around it. He is a master of edges and tonal relationships. When he paints an ocean he paints its beautiful desolation and vastness, somehow cramming a hundred miles of ocean and air into a tiny panel. When he paints the night (the show contains his smallest nocturne) he comes very close to total abstraction, but then you look for edges and shapes and slowly you find a horizon, then water, then sky. Your eyes adjust to the painting like they adjust to the night.

There is one particular seascape that, to me, is sublime:

This painting is easy to miss. At first blush it looks as though he started a seascape and then decided to wipe it off-- the image seems to emerge from the gesso like an underexposed painterly Polaroid. The edges dissolve away, at least partially because of the notches in the easel into which he slid the panel. The ground is very dark, maybe raw umber, and the paint is streaky and thin. The wispy ropes of whitish paint that make up the breaking waves are wonderfully opalescent, like liquid pearl. The figures are ghostly, mere silhouettes imprinted against the backdrop of the sand. This painting, and many of the others, have a sweet, sad and somehow haunting distance to them. They are faded memories. I get the same feeling from those old daguerotypes (see below) or silent movies where scratches and faded edges create a kind of dusty window pane through which we can see into the past. Upon further study, those seemingly simple figures reveal themselves to be carefully painted. The ones in the foreground appear to be, like us, simply appreciating the sea. One is in a long dress with hands clasped behind her back. Two are sitting in the sand. There are three of people making their way to the waters edge, one with white shorts, and a child. There is little sound in this painting-- maybe the hush of the ocean and the wind, but no voices because we are too far away to hear them. Whistler does little to distract us with his presence-- no bravura brushwork or cleverness for the sake of cleverness. Whistler leaves us alone to stare at the sea.

Daguerotype of The Alamo, Hiroshima:

more paintings from the show:

Matters of Subject

2007-07-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of that moment when something makes me want to paint it. The origin of this moment, or the “why” of this moment, is hard to discern because it can have such a long and complex ancestry of influences and because explaining a longing to paint something is difficult to put into words. Frankly, I often don’t know why certain things make me want to paint them and not others. Cezanne called these moments “petite sensations.” “The sensations” he said, “ which are the basis of my work, cannot be penetrated.” I always have an initial notion about what attracts me to a scene or object but it often seems that the deeper reasons come after I begin to paint. It is by the very act of painting something that I begin to get a sense of what moved me to paint it in the first place. So I suppose I don’t necessarily paint something because it is beautiful, rather, it becomes beautiful to me because I paint it. When Hopper painted a lighthouse, he wasn’t just painting a lighthouse per se. He was painting light, the feeling of a certain kind of day, the wind and air, and an undercurrent of loneliness. The lighthouse served as a vehicle through which he conveyed those things, consciously or unconsciously. I doubt he started painting that lighthouse thinking he wanted to paint loneliness-- it seemed to be a by-product of his investigation of paint and light, and an honest and clear expression of the unnamable feeling he had when he viewed it. He found a universe of thought and feeling in a lighthouse and had the skill to transfer this feeling to us via paint.

It is easy to start second-guessing yourself and lose that initial “sensation”-- the paralysis of analysis. PAD has an aspect to it of jumping in that I liked very much. The practicalities of having to paint each day forces you to paint first and think later-- to respond to your instincts and think and contemplate as you paint, rather than trying to calculate a specific outcome. This is not to say that you have to shoot from the hip or that the process is devoid of intellectual considerations, but I believe those “small sensations” happen before our brain starts trying to make sense of them. Not every emotional response requires a rhyme and a reason before we allow ourselves to paint a certain subject. I think part of the way a painter finds his subject matter is my trusting his instincts and just painting.

What we want to paint can be very different than what we want to photograph, or draw, or even what we simply enjoy looking at-- just because you like flowers doesn’t mean you want to paint them. When you have spent many years painting I think the personal aesthetics of beauty are no longer separate from the aesthetics of paint. What is a painterly aesthetic? Many years ago I discovered in one of Velazquez’s early paintings his thumbprints in the paint (at least I thought it was a thumbprint-- who knows really?) The thumbprint was used to describe a piece of reflected light on the bottom half of a lime. There was something wonderful about how his thumb had lifted off some paint to reveal the warm ground underneath, and how that warmth acted as the glow of light from the surface the table on which the lemon sits, and how, in addition to it’s representational finesse it still remained a thumbprint like you’d see a five year old make while finger painting. When I put an actual lime in front of me I could see how he saw it and why he came to the conclusion that his thumb was the best tool for the job. I suddenly wanted to paint a lime but not just because of the color or shape or texture but rather I wanted to paint a lime because of how Velazquez moved the paint when he painted one. For a long while I would “see” that thumbprint in all limes... I was channeling Velazquez through a lime!

Obviously, what we paint is partially based upon or at least inspired by the work of painters we admire. In the beginning or my artistic training, even several years into it, when I looked for something to paint what I was really doing was finding something that Rembrandt or Vermeer (or any of my other favorite painters) would paint. I was looking through the eyes of other painters. I would be thinking, “Rembrandt would have liked this” or “Cezanne would have liked that” etc. I wasn’t necessarily copying or consciously painting “in the manner of” but their painterly aesthetic became mine. When you tell a beginning painting student to choose a subject to paint, the look in their eyes is akin to panic. First, they flip through their internal rolodex of famous paintings (this usually results in a montage played in their mind which blurs together like a flip-book movie into a single image of a wine bottle and grapes.) Second, they filter out the things they feel are outside the realm of their abilities (as if they knew what their abilities were in the first place.) Third, they attempt to discern what it is their audience (me) would prefer to see them paint. Lastly, they try to decide if their choice is “worthy” of being painted (ie is it too trivial or not “arty” enough etc?) So their choice is initially filtered by a kind of artistic fashion tempered by perceived practical considerations. As I painted more I began to see things through my own eyes, and my technique developed in a way to serve my own vision. But I still see Vermeer’s paint in a white wall and Hopper’s paint in the night and Rembrandt’s impasto in faces. Degas once said that art is not what you see but what you make others see.

So a painterly aesthetic develops when the way we like to move paint begins to mesh with our sense of what is beautiful. Did I choose this thing to paint because of how it strikes my eye or because of the license it might gives me to move the paint? In an essay by Louis Finkelstein, he conveys De Kooning’s thoughts on Courbet:

...it was not simply where his donkey stopped that he painted, but where the qualities of wetness and dappled light had just that propensity for translation into palette-knifed paint. So is it that the compulsion for a certain kind of paint leads one to the leaves, or do the habits imposed by the process promote a habit of mind which then transvaluates a technique?

Paint colors how we see.

My wife always knows when I am looking for something to paint because I have a very specific look on my face-- I suppose it must look like a thousand yard stare. I am looking at nothing and everything (I would love to see what parts of my brain light up in a brain scan during this process.) What am I looking for really? I get the sense that I am not so much trying to find something to paint as trying to make myself receptive to that vague and amorphous longing to paint. It is as though these objects and places are sentient and that they choose me.

Question: What kind of brushes/paints/medium do you use?

2007-04-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago I made a Google Group to answer questions about painting etc. I found out that moderating such a group and keeping it organized takes up a lot of time-- more time than I have. So I've decided a better way to do it is to simply take the questions I get most often via email and publish them on this blog every now and then, in between my other posts.

So here's the answer to the question above:

Brushes: I use Robert Simmons Titanium Series synthetic brushes and whatever decent hogs hair bristles are available at my local art store (Main Art.) The RS brushes are soft but stiff and they hold a point fairly well up to about size 8/10 or so. Anything larger than that and I find that they fail to handle the weight of the paint and thus lose their bounce. They can also take a beating: they don't fray easily and they can take some rough cleaning when, say, trying to clean semi-dried paint from them. In terms of type, I mostly use rounds, size 4-10.

Medium: I use a 1-1-1 ratio of venetian turpentine, stand oil, turpentine. This is extremely thick and has to be used sparingly. I like it because it adds a slow, gentle tack to the paint (as opposed to the quick, agressive tack of liquin.) It slows the drying down a little bit in relation to a traditional medium, and it also works well in thin glazes. I do not recommend this for beginners because it's excessive use can make for a sticky mess. Fringe benefit: venetian turps (a balsam) smells nice...

Paints: For the last few years I've been using Williamsburg Oil Paints, made by Carl Plansky in Brooklyn. Each tube is crammed with pigment (which can take some getting used if you've been using a more typical grade of paint) and he allows every pigment to keep it's unique character rather than making the usual homogenized, bland toothpaste-like consistency seen in many paints these days. So some colors might be a little grainy and others might be more slippery and creamy.

On A-Painting-a-Day (Part 3)

2007-03-01T12:34:00.000-08:00

As I watch the PAD movement grow into the hundreds (thousands?) I thought it might be an appropriate time to look more deeply into what, exactly, the PAD idea is. In each of the next few posts I’d like to talk about one aspect of the practice of making a painting each day (as opposed to the business side of it.)

I’ve been struck by how many emails I have received from non-artists wanting to learn how to paint and start their own PAD projects. They typically aren’t interested in selling or even showing their work publicly. They often have full-time jobs and kids. It finally occurred to me there is something going on here that goes beyond wanting to learn how to paint a pretty picture, and I think it taps into an underlying attraction to the idea of making a painting a day:

We go through our lives with a perpetual cursory glance. We see but we don’t notice. It is like when we are on a long car trip and get so lost in thought that we suddenly can’t remember the last 30 minutes of the trip… the landscape, the road signs, nothing. We didn’t crash, so we were seeing, but we weren’t noticing. I had an experience once when I was visiting California several years ago. A crowd had gathered on the beach to watch the sunset. As I joined them, I overheard someone talking about a green flash. I asked what she meant. She explained that the moment the sun disappears behind the horizon there will be a green flash. I had lived in California as a child and had seen many ocean sunsets and not once did I see a green flash. I was skeptical. But sure enough, there was a green flash. I watched for it again the next day, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It was there. I did some research and found that the green flash is a well-known natural phenomenon. This, in and of itself, is not too unusual in the big scheme of things. What amazed me, however, was that I had never seen it before, even though I had been looking right at it during dozens of sunsets. I later read a book, Robert Pirsig’s “Lila,” where in one chapter he wrote of a similar experience. He led me to wonder about what else I might be missing. If I can look at dozens of sunsets and not see something so obvious and beautiful as that green flash, what is going on around me, right now, that I am missing simply because I am not prepared to notice it? What image is hitting my retina that my brain is not allowing to get through to me? Add to this the fact that we live in a hyper-visual world. We are bombarded with imagery-TV, video, cameras, camera phones, movies, computers etc. All of this information forms the visual equivalent of white noise. It is hard to see and appreciate the colors in a candle flame when it is seen against a fireworks display-- and if we are only looking for fireworks in the first place, we will not only not see the subtleties of that single flame, we won’t notice the flame at all. In effect, the flame ceases to exist to us.

In some sense we are using our eyes more than ever before, but this seeing is often relegated to fourth-hand imagery—images that are produced by someone else, edited, filtered and then translated into 0s and 1s for our quick and easy consumption. Direct observation and the patience it requires has become less natural to us. When you go to any art museum, look how much time the average person spends in front of even the greatest painting... not much. Or look what happens when somebody is on vacation and discovers some amazing vista… out comes the camera for a snapshot and then it’s time to move on. We simply aren’t used to observing things firsthand, of investigating them, and I think we sense this—that we’re missing something; that we have, to some degree, become spectators of our own lives. I think this is one aspect of the PAD idea that draws artists and non-artists alike to the idea of making a painting a day. Even to the uninitiated, there is the notion that painting makes us participants again. The idea of bringing painting into our life holds the promise of experiencing a moment each day when we can be still. We turn off the TV and the cell phone, and we paint

The very act of carrying a cigar box easel around activates our eyes because we know we have to do a painting that day. The daily deadline intensifies the process of looking. You have to find a subject (soon… always soon) and so you are constantly searching-- in the supermarket, in class, in your backyard, wherever you are. Your mind wakes up as you prepare yourself to paint. Indeed, if you practice it long enough you begin to paint even when you aren’t painting. That cigar box holds more than paint—it holds the potential for us to have a quiet moment alone with ourselves and to savor something that we find to be interesting or beautiful. On the one hand it is a brief respite from the electric hum of modern life but on the other it is the opposite—a way to face and thus reenter our visual world. Annie Dillard wrote, “ Admire the world for never ending on you as you would admire an opponent, without taking your eyes off him, or walking away.”

Update...

2007-02-17T10:04:00.000-08:00

Hi Folks, sorry for my long absence from this blog. I've been working on several posts but haven't had the time to finish them. I'll be posting them soon.

Varnishing-- The Six Month Rule

2006-10-30T18:50:00.000-08:00

When is it safe to varnish an oil painting? You might be surprised.

A varnish has two main requirements: it must protect the painting and it must be removable. It must be removable so that the painting can be cleaned or repaired if necessary. Putting a varnish on too early can hinder the proper drying of a painting and/or lift up some of the paint underneath when brushing it on. It can also, in effect, fuse to the painting and thus become difficult to remove without removing some of the painting along with it.

As to the six-month rule, here's a quote from Ralph Mayer (who wrote the book that should be, if it isn't already, in every painter's library:"The Artist's Handbook"), in his less well-known book "The Painter's Craft," he says:

"This question of premature varnishing in not nearly so serious or important as artists have been given to believe; a picture does not run very much risk of being damaged if it is varnished soon after it has become thoroughly dry to the touch or surface-dry. It was a more serious consideration in the past, when copal or very thick glassy coatings of mastic varnish were applied; these were quite capable of injuring a tender or soft layer by the great strain that was put upon the surface by the contraction or compression of their drying."

He goes on:

"My own recomendation has always been to varnish as soon a the paint appears completely dry-- in the case of thin paintings a few weeks, heavier paintings a month or two. In an emergency, when a painting must leave the artist's hands soon after being finished, I would say that it would be less risky to varnish as soon as the painting will take it than allow it to leave unvarnished."

"Dirt will settle onto an unvarnished painting and, with the passage of time, will become so imbedded thsat cleaning becomes difficult and sometimes impossible."

For my one-sitting pieces I usually wait about a month before varnishing (unless I use unusually slow-drying paint or medium) for my more complex paintings I'll typically wait a couple months.. I've tested dozens of paintings my removing and then re-applying varnish with no problems.

Also, if you're looking for a varnish, Soluvar works very well.

Here's some info from Gamblin which I originally added to the comments section:

Also, the following is from Gamblin's FAQ page at:

http://www.gamblincolors.com/faq/varnish.html

Q: How long do I have to wait till I varnish my painting, 6 months, 9 months?

A: The answer is simple and complex. You can safely varnish when the painting is dry. But when is a painting dry?

Some paintings are dry enough to varnish after two weeks. Some are not ready for two years. If you paint thinly with fast drying colors and use a fast drying medium, in a warm and dry climate, then the painting may be ready to varnish in two weeks. But if you painted using Alizarin Crimson to make a half inch thick layer using poppy oil as a medium then the painting may not be ready to varnish in two years, if ever!

How to tell if a painting is ready to varnish is easy -- just touch it. If there are impasto areas, gently press your fingernail into that impasto. If it is firm underneath the surface of the painting then it is ready for varnishing.

Fanny Brennan

2006-10-23T06:46:00.000-07:00

I've always loved her work. I remember walking into a gallery space in NY about 15 years ago and being completely transfixed by her tiny paintings (they are typically a little larger than a postage stamp.) I think the labels were bigger than the paintings. I recently googled her name to see what she has been up to and I was saddened to find that she recently passed away. Click here to see more of her work.

On Finding the Right Mark

2006-10-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

My Grandfather wrote me letters from time to time when I was younger. As he got older, his writing changed. It got more faint and delicate. Toward the end of his life it got shaky; the lines were as fragile as a strand of spider web. When I opened his letters I could discern how he was doing health-wise even before reading the words. The lines, apart from the words and sentences they served, revealed everything. Those lines were very powerful and meaningful to me. He could have simply drawn a straight line across a page and sent it to me and I would have been able to sense how he was doing.

For a representational painter, a paint mark lives a dual life: it both describes and expresses. On the one hand a mark directs a viewer to a thing, and on the other hand it directs a viewer to itself. When we make a mark representing part of an apple, for instance, the mark is serving to describe the color, shape, form etc of the apple,but it is also describing the painter’s response to the apple my recording the movement of his brush: it’s viscosity, it’s speed, it’s boldness or tentativeness etc. all get recorded in paint. The brush acts like a Richter scale of sorts, with visual and emotional vibrations being registered rather than the movement of the earth. James Elkins describes paint as being “liquid thought.”

Cezanne’s apples are wonderfully dense and tangible… if you dropped one it would crack a concrete floor. Even the air around them seems dense. They are solid and full not because of the usual visual tricks of polished chiaroscuro but rather because of the very nature of the marks themselves: each one looks as though it had been considered for a year before it was executed. None are flippant or simply clever. It is the very weight of the marks that gives the apples such a tangible weight:

Tabel, Napkin, and Fruit(detail)
1895-1900, oil on canvas,18 1/4x 24 inches

Vermeer treated paint like liquid jewels (actually, his ultramarine blue was literally made from lapis lazuli.) In every square inch of his paintings there is a reverence for the paint that manifests itself in the cathedral-like silence felt when standing in front of any of his work:

A Woman Asleep (detail)
c.1656-57
oil on canvas
34 1/2 x 30 1/8

The process of finding the “right” mark-- a mark placed in the right place, in the right way, at the right time, is still a mystery to me. Sometimes it seems to happen by accident and other times it seems preordained. When I aim for it, I always miss it. If I’m too flippant, I miss it. If I try to repeat a past success, I miss it. When my Dad taught me to shoot a pistol I was told to breath out and gradually squeeze the trigger. If you’re doing it right, the sound of the gun should be a surprise. Anticipating that sound causes the hand and thus the gun to move slightly the moment before the round leaves the chamber. And you miss.

Annie Dillard wrote in her book The Writing Life:

“A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of paint.”

The above could be advice to an aspiring painter, “Do you like marks?” If your sole purpose for making marks is to cover the canvas and make a nice picture, then perhaps a house painter would be a better career. If, however, you like how the paint feels under your brush, how it sounds when it slides across the canvas, how it smells etc, then you are already a “joyful painter.”

We all have those moments when we find ourselves avoiding sections of a painting. We chose to paint something because of THIS, but in so doing we need to paint THAT too.A teacher of mine once said that if a painting looks overworked it needs more work. I think a painting looks overworked when a painter does not connect what the paint is doing to what the paint is representing. When this happens the painting is merely a copy of something, a bad facsimile of life. In any painting you can often see where the painter was enjoying the paint and also where he was merely covering canvas. Part of our job as painters is to find a way to savor (not pretend to savor) even those passages of our painting that we dread.

Predicting or even defining a “right” mark is probably impossible, at least in a way that could be very helpful to us at the easel. Every great painter I’ve had the privilege of watching paint, had a sense of play when at the easel. They are incredibly knowledgeable about the behavior of paint and color, but none of that knowledge seems to be written in stone. Every subject requires a slightly different way of handling the paint, and these terrific painters were not only open to those new possibilities, but seemed to welcome and enjoy them. They seemed to be looking for questions rather than answers.

A mark is a decision—a decision so complex that we can’t possibly be aware of all of the elements that go into making it. We can maybe predict its general shape; its general thickness, how it will catch the light etc, but we cannot predict its success or failure. We don’t really know anything until the mark is made. Making a mark, in the end, is not an intellectual exercise. All we can do is to try to have a “beginner’s mind” when we paint: “the mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the experts, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all possibilities.”—Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.

The Shock of the New

2006-09-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

Publishers, record companies, movie companies and galleries are in a similar situation these days. Change is coming and they aren’t quite ready for it. This is not a rant against any of these industries. They have done more good than bad. After all, we have kept them in business by choosing to buy from them. They have served our purposes, as music listeners and collectors and readers and moviegoers. We can get any song and any book and any movie ever made for a nominal price (I’ve seen the entire encyclopedia set sold as a coupon offer on a pack of cheese!) Clearly, as collectors, we generally get what we want. The artist, on the other hand… well, you know the story. The artist didn’t have ways to print his books or record his music or film his movie without some big expensive equipment and guys to run it. They had no simple way to publicize it and they had no way to distribute it. That is how the companies made themselves useful. They are not leviathans that landed on our planet and enforced their will on us. They grew because the consumer wanted them and artists needed them.

A couple recent headlines:

Today MySpace.com announced they are opening a music store for 3 million unsigned bands to sell their music.

Blurb.com allows you to make your own high quality, hardbound books and then sell them via their online bookstore.

And here are a couple of recent quotes. One is from a recent Wired Magazine article about self-publishing, and one is from the USA Today article on blogs and artists:

-HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman says self-publishing is little more than a vanity press. "A good book will get published," she said. "Self-publishing is denying that fact. The filters of agent, editor and publisher are still essential."

- "Most don't look like anything special," says Howard Rehs, co-owner of Rehs Galleries in New York. Dealers work with buyers "who are looking to build collections that have some relevance, importance or meaning." The bloggers are just "a little blip in the art world, something that will fill a niche for those people who want to buy something real and not just a poster."

Each quote assumes a low level of quality for the simple reason that the work does not reside within a publishing company or a gallery. In other words, they are saying, “If it isn’t in a gallery or it hasn’t been published by us, then obviously it simply wasn’t good enough to get there.” What fascinates me is not their condescension, but rather their myopia. They apparently don’t see that the Internet is not a type of painting or type of book. The Internet is, like their respective industries, another tool to present, sell and distribute works of literature, works of art etc. Except this particular tool fits more comfortably into the hands of artists.

The Harper Collin CEO is correct about one thing. The Internet has no filter. It costs very little for a writer to publish a book and anyone with a paintbrush can start a blog. I’m assuming it will cost very little for a band to get into the MySpace.com music store. Obviously there is going to be a lot of inexperienced work flooding the arena. So what? There will be great work too. The old industries view themselves as the gatekeepers and cultivators of quality but in reality they have become more like simple tollbooth collectors-- “Follow my signs, get in the proper lane, mind my rules, pay your toll and maybe I’ll lift the gate.”

Up until the last few years, a painter had only a vague notion of how he might make a living from his work. “OK, I’ll make paintings that are so good a NY Gallery will represent me, I’ll have some group shows, I’ll have some one-man shows, and then there will be reviews, and then I’ll get anointed “famous artist” and then I’ll be making a living.” The tollgate will rise (I wonder if Van Gogh would have gotten through that tollgate?) The problem is this: for 99.9% of painters, it didn’t work. Sure, you could maybe get into a gallery, even NY Gallery, but a gallery typically has 50 other artists to represent. Often (not always) a gallery does not have the time to spend on the groundwork necessary to promote the artist. Their 50% commission is often “earned” by offering wall space once a year or so and to the accompanying access to their patrons. Sometimes this is worth the 50% commission depending on the gallery. If you have a gallery director who is in your corner, it can be a good situation. But most of the time your work is going to be lumped in with a couple hundred other paintings. A gallery needs to pay for the substantial overhead of running a business, so I don’t want to present them as The Man beating down the little guy. Our 50% is not necessarily going towards trips to the Bahamas for the owners. I have had good relationships with galleries and still do. But clearly a marketplace has developed that makes it almost impossible for a painter to make even a meager living.

But now we have a situation where artists are starting to make their own way. More and more, their success depends on their work and on their own business plan and their own marketing. But it won’t be easy and it won’t be perfect. Being heard above the millions of other people trying to be heard is a challenge. There will be a need to rise above the clutter and where there is a need there will be companies that want to fulfill that need. Perhaps they will be the new gatekeepers. Who knows? Galleries etc aren’t going away, not should they. Seeing a painting on a wall is, and always will be, a better way to see a painting. But I predict art galleries, unless they adapt and change, will not be quite as dominant in terms of deciding who is in and who is out. Screen technology has gotten to the point where the surface of a panting can be seen fairly well. This technology will only get better, and cheaper.Sending a painting, anywhere in the world, is relatively cheap. So collectors are only going to become more and more comfortable buying work online.

Starting a blog does not guarantee anybody will see it. It does not guarantee you will make a living from it and it certainly won’t make you a better painter. But it does guarantee that your work has the potential to be seen or heard by millions of people and it guarantees that somebody will be working hard to make that happen...you.

On A-Painting-a-Day (Part 2)

2006-08-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

Since I began my blog, there have been many dozens of painters (and potters, draftsmen, photographers) who have borrowed the painting-a-day (PAD) template for their own work, with varying degrees of success. I have a mixed reaction to this. No, it does not bother me that people use the concept. I think it has tapped into an invisible strata of collectors that were always interested in painting but who didn't feel comfortable spending the money usually necessary to buy original paintings. It is also indicative of what I believe is the begining of a shift in power from galleries to the artists (more on this later.) These are good things, and so the more people painting the better. Most of the painters have been very kind in giving be credit on their blogs as the impetus for their own PAD. Also, I enjoy watching what they do with their work and what twists they add to the idea.

There are two things that are a problem: some of what I am seeing now is people tacking their work onto the business model. I built the business model around my work, not the other way around. In short, the way some painters work doesn't always fit into the PAD idea. I'm not denigrating the work (there are some good painters out there) I'm just saying that everyone has their own unique way of painting and they would be better served, as painters, to design a creative/business model that suits there own unique work instead of trying to fit the proverbial square peg into the round hole. Secondly, the business side of painting has to be kept separate from what happens at the easel, and this is almost impossible if you do not have a sense of who you are as a painter. If you are a beginner, and you become involved in the day to day machinations of what is selling and what is not, it is very hard to treat painting like an exploration... it devolves into a search for answers rather than a search for questions.

Vermeer

2006-08-16T06:02:00.000-07:00

I discovered this very interesting site dedicated to seemingly every nook and cranny of his life and work.

On A-Painting-a-Day (Part 1)

2006-08-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years I've been asked a lot of questions about my Postcard Painting project and how it got started etc so I figured I'd write down some of my answers in this blog from time to time:

Several years ago I sat in my studio and looked at several small oil studies I had made and I wondered what I should do with them. The galleries that represented me at the time were not particularly interested in them and I didn’t have any room in my house to hang them. Back then I was almost completely reliant on galleries to sell my work. I decided I would use my studio as a gallery (complete with makeshift track lighting) and have an opening for my family and friends. The prices on my larger paintings had risen over the last decade, to the point where many of my original collectors could no longer afford my work. So I priced the work at $100 each. I called them Postcard Paintings because of their size and because, like the dime-store postcards you send while on vacation, each painting kind of says to it’s recipient, “this is what I saw.” I called the show “100 paintings for $100.” The opening/party was a big hit (probably owing as much to the large qunatities of beer and wine as to the paintings.) I sold a lot of work, everybody had a great time, and a lot of people bought their first original oil painting. It was very exciting for me and it was the first time I realized that galleries aren’t the only way to present and sell paintings. I had several more shows after that and started to learn my way around the web and how to present my work via zeroes and ones.

At that point I decided to challenge myself to make a painting each day. I knew this would be much more demanding than simply painting everyday. To make a complete painting means starting AND ending a painting, as opposed to painting for awhile and picking up where you left off the next day or next week. I liked the idea of getting up each day and looking, and finding, and savoring something through the process of painting. My subjects could be anything: read this Annie Dillard quote. I consider it to be a meditation, a discipline that requires me to be STILL (mentally and physically) for a few hours regardless of what else is going on in my life. I also felt it would make me a better painter. I had a desire to reconnect with the paint again and this seemed like a good project for that (my teacher Ray Berry had us do a lot of small studies on gessoed paper which really allowed us to play with the paint and get comfortable with moving it around.) So I built my life around this experiment. On vacations, holidays, sickness and in health etc, I made a painting each day. It was difficult but exhilarating. After a while I felt like I was always painting, even when I wasn’t painting. I have to admit there were some days when I felt I’d rather dig a ditch than paint. But that became part of the process… to get my mind into my painting and rise above the clutter that a day can throw at you-- not in a superficial “let me get this over with” way, but to truly and honestly savor what I was doing. After painting I always felt… clean.

I started experimenting with blogs… actually I just wanted to find out what the hell a blog was. I remember thinking the journal-like aspect of blogging seemed appropriate for what I was doing, so I posted a few images and called the blog “A Painting a Day.” About a week later I got fifty emails in my inbox from all over the world. The next day even more. . They were all emailing me about my work and my blog. I couldn’t figure out what was happening until someone emailed me that BoingBoing.net did a little story on my project. Apparently a LOT of people read BoingBoing.net And that is when I discovered the wonders of “viral marketing.” People started linking my blog on their blogs (word of mouth x100.) At the time, the paintings were sold first-come first-served for $100. The first person to email me got the painting. They started to sell within minutes. Unless you were tethered to a computer all day it was hard to buy one. So after several months I decided to try Ebay. This gives people the time to consider a painting over the course of several days and then, if interested, decide what they think it’s worth. I still have body of work that I sell for the set-price of $100 now. I call them oddments.

After about a year and three months I felt like the strict painting-a-day project had served it’s purpose for me. I am still making close to a painting-a-day, but now I have the freedom to work on other projects.