PAINTING DILEMMAS: A Fatal Addiction to Genre

Howard Post

"…the unending effort to find a balance between sentiment and irony, between beauty and rigor..."

-fictional character Peter Harris in Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall, 2010.

I have invested the natural world  with profound erotic content and transcendent power.  Birdsong, warm sun, distant mountains, tropical islands, clouds: all vessels bestowing endless grace upon my daily climb to maintain footholds that keep me present to life.

Landscape painting seems a worthy attempt when I start in this place. If I paint, I wish the closure's volume to hold a singular position: an informed, mostly unreferential, only slightly polished quality. 

Best words for this:  Japanese concepts of wabi-sabi (imperfect), miyabi (elegance), shibui (subtle),iki (originality), yu-gen (mystery),ensou (the void), kawaii (cute), geido (discipline and ethics), jo-ha-ku (slow acceleration to sudden conclusion.

What's wrong with this painting? I respond deeply to its colors, elegiac serenity, and long vision. 

 But:  it's all too familiar.  It remains an illustration, not a painting.  N.C. Wyeth's "iki" has been appropriated and worked over and through here, and this creates much empathy for me with Post's work: with regret I state the problems that restrain Post.

The reduction of forms perhaps increases and reduces rigor in art; the balance of qualities contains mystery. Observations that nudge before words are made wait for assistance from mentors to formulate expressions of the viewed experience. 

My art knowledge introduces shoulds - there is little complexity in Post's painting, no rigor here, just easy soft pleasure washing into fantasy.

In a NYT article titled "The Paradox of Art as Work", A.O. Scott posits that an artist's job is "…to show us something we didn't know we needed to see."

So, simple, yes? No. Regretfully, I feel no duty to show you what you need to see. It's much more selfish: I want to show what I needed to say about the place I saw, to remember it well. It's always about being struck by beauty.

So perhaps I'm not an artist; my use of art for self and how my self needs it to be don't end with philosophical or conceptual solutions to puzzles, political agendas. My emotional and spiritual needs prevent me from attaining the position of "contemporary artist".