Okay, I'm back on track with my postings, now, at least, for today, anyway. Here is yesterday's output: Green & White No. 1 and Green & White No. 2. This continues the concept of using a single color on a white ground, as I've been doing, lately - and have been doing, off and on, since I began doing these small paintings on paper, back in mid-October (the point at which I went from the 14"x17" paper format to the 8.5"x11" cardstock I've been using since). Actually, I started the single color on a white ground before then. Anyway, I'm continuing in that vein, lately, trying some combinations I hadn't yet explored, and these two are the latest, as of Monday.
I selected Thalo Green as the color for my foreground knifework in this series, simply because I was too low on Permanent Green to complete a pair of paintings yesterday. So, you see, we artists make some of our decisions based upon the most mundane and practical of matters, not always out of some mystical visionary revelation that came to us in the middle of the night. I hate to break it to you, but that's probably more often the case than not.
Anyway, the Thalo Green wouldn't have been my preference of greens, if I'd had adequate supplies on hand, as it tends to be too dark when in its fully concentrated form; i.e., when it's spread thickly. The only places where the color green really becomes apparent, where it really "reads" as a green, are in those areas that are spread more thinly over the white ground. In this respect, the Permanent Green would have been a better choice, as it's more readily seen as green, whether spread thick or thin.
Having said that, I'll now address the green in the ground, which is obviously not pure white, for a reason. Yes, I did do that deliberately! As I've been doing all along, I paint my grounds starting with an underpainting of either the same color I'll be using for the knifework, or I use another shade of the same color. In some cases, I'll use a Nutmeg Brown underpainting, even if I'm not using brown as my knifework color. In this case, the underpainting is Hooker's Green. As usual, I have scumbled the dominant ground color (white, in this case) over the underpainting, very loosely and rapidly, with the idea in mind of allowing the underpainting to show through, here and there. That's how the rich variety of visual textures are created in the ground plane. Sometimes, as I'm doing this, I have the thought of someone watching me do it and saying to me, "Oh, you missed a spot!" To which I'd reply, "Yes, I did, and quite intentionally, too!" Now you know why I paint alone. ;)
The whole idea is to create a painting that has something there to keep the viewer's eyes constantly moving.
If the whole painting is immediately apprehended at first glance, the viewer will lose interest almost right away. Since I have no recognizable subject matter to grab and hold a viewer's interest, I am forced to grab their attention and hold it with the very paint, itself, or, rather, with how the paint is handled. Thus, you see how it is that my work is all about the paint, how it's handled and it's relationship to the surface (the paper, in this case). This sort of explains why minimalism has never found a very large or enthusiastic audience, doesn't it? If the painting is all one color, without any variation in the color and no texture at all, the whole painting is taken in at a single moment's glance - and then the viewer is off to look at another painting.
I recently viewed an online gallery that consisted entirely of several minimalist painters' works, and everything there looked pretty much the same - not only within each painter's portfolio, but from painter to painter. Unless you looked very closely, you'd swear the webmaster had simply copied and pasted the same images into each artist's page, over and over again. The only standouts were those who were daring enough to depart from the conventional canvas support and try painting on sheet metal (steel or aluminum, I think), letting the reflective properties of the metal show through the transparently applied paint. These were the most interesting pieces displayed there.
Like a well written song, a painting needs to have its "hooks" - those little elements that, when combined together, grab and holder the listener's or, in the case of paintings, the viewer's attention and won't let go. So, that's part of what I am striving to create in my paintings. To the extent that I do so is the extent to which they succeed, in my opinion.
2 comments:
I like what you said here, especially the bit about paintings being like songs which need "hooks". I also appreciate this:
"Thus, you see how it is that my work is all about the paint, how it's handled and it's relationship to the surface (the paper, in this case). "
This is where people get miffed with modern art. They can't seem to comprehend that a painting can simply be about paint and it's relationship with its surface. They feel that there must be a narrative of some sort, a narrative of the recognizable, meaning they need to recognize a picture, a face, a figure, in the painting for them to connect with it. But when this is absent, they do not know what to do, how to comprehend what they're looking at. And so they turn to those of the critic class who has, in the case of the "Action/Abstraction" show, overblown the significance of the relationship between the surface and paint.
This is not to say that this relationship can't have meaning, or take the viewer to another place, but it simply doesn't have to. Just like you chose Thalo Green because it's what you had and not because something mystical told you to.
My question to you would be, how does one teach people to understand this idea of art? For me this makes complete sense. But for others it's a real struggle. Or should it even matter? Philip Glass would say something like "If you don't like my music, then don't listen to my music." Would you agree with this both philosophically and personally?
Thanks for the very well conceived and thoughtful comment, Ben.
Yes, I would tend to agree with Glass on this matter. There are many who don't comprehend philosophy, either, and I submit that the main reason for this is a lack of education on the subject. This holds true of art, as well. I know that, to some, that smacks of elitism, but it's also the truth, isn't it? When high school art programs began to be terminated in the late eighties, allegedly due to budgetary reasons, what do you suppose the outcome of that would have been, if not the further dumbing down of Americans, particularly as far as art is concerned? The result is a generation of people who may never learn a thing about art unless they're exposed to it in college, and even there, the exposure is minimal, at best, unless one attends a dedicated art school.
Another aspect of this is that there has long been, in America, a tradition of anti-intellectualism, particularly during the last century or so.
I think it's part of the human condition to seek out the familiar, so, when no other rules seem to be in evidence, that's what people do. They look for familiar objects in a painting - even paintings that are clearly conceived in such a way as to be devoid of any such references. When they don't find anything familiar, they don't comprehend.
But, my point is that there is often nothing to BE comprehended at all, and this is what people need to understand; i.e., that art doesn't necessarily attempt to be understood. In some cases, the artist has created it purely for decorative purposes and it was never intended to have any meaning at all.
It's when the priesthood of the artworld; i.e., the critic class, gets hold of modern art that the pretentiousness is cranked up, I believe. The artists, themselves may, like me, intend no deeper meaning in their work than I do, but the critics, in their need to justify their own existence, will supply a meaning, anyway. In some cases, the artists themselves, who may never have thought of their work that way before, will be swayed to do so. Personally, I don't care how others interpret my paintings. Everyone will have their own take on it, and that's fine. But, it's when someone like a Clement Greenburg gets hold of it that the critic's own ego gets into the act and his writings on a particular artist's works begin to become the meaning of those works - whether the artist ever intended any such thing or not. I really don't believe that Jackson Pollack or Mark Rothko would have said half the things they're quoted as saying about their art if they hadn't heard it from Greenburg first. It's a case of cross-pollenation of ideas. The artist influences the critic, the critic influences the artist. So, usually, I don't pay much attention to critics, myself. I know what my art's about and I don't need someone else to tell me about it.
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