PAINTING: Jim Lee

I am stimulated and excited here.  This painter is doing things with the surfaces, wood, collage and constructions which are so unified and clean and evocative and engaging spatially.

I have ephemeral unfocused urges to paint and use wood materials, scraps of canvas, stuff, maps, but can't figure out what to do with them, now I'm going to try.

I'm going to get an old palette and paint on it just let go and do it.

ART: ADMIRED PAINTERS LIFE LIST

THIS IS A LIST I KEEP AND TEND frequently.
It's meant for me to keep as benchmarks for my artistic life, touchbacks for reflection.

4-1-15   LOIS DODD

A loner figurative artist I place in a loose group with Neil Welliver, Fairchild Porter, and Charles Burchfield, other east coast figurative painters I cherish for their deep and abiding love and depiction of nature.  I love it that she's loose, gestural. She's old, lives modestly. Has a following.

2-27-15  JOYCE KOZLOFF
One of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration Movement, to which I am drawn because of it's joyous celebration of visual delights.  Scully says we create because we are divided.  P&D I think comes from the need to fill the void, and because it serves human needs for visual complexity and novelty. 

2-26-15  KIM MCCONNAL

2-27-15 ROBERT KUSCHNER

2-26-15  EGON SCHIELE

1914

I love the attenuated, hungry, bold angular geometries, the powerful delicate line, the guiltless and forbidden quality of Schiele's celebration of sexuality, 






Marlene Dumas

MARK ROTHKO

VINCENT VAN GOGH

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

MILTON AVERY

AGNES MARTIN

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

PAUL KLEE

RACKSTRAW DOWNS

FAIRFIELD PORTER

WINSLOW HOMER

CAMILLE PISARRO

JOHN SINGER SARGENT

RUSSELL CHATHAM

PETER DOIG

WAYNE THIEBAUD

EDWARD HOPPER

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

JMW TURNER

EDOUARD MANET

SEAN SCULLY

RICHARD POUSSETTE-DART

JOSEPH CORNELL

BRICE MARDEN

ROBERT RYMAN

MIRIAM SHAPIRO

HELEN FRANKENTHALER


CHARLES BURCHFIELD

EDGAR DEGAS

CHARLES DEMUTH

DAVID HOCKNEY

MAYNARD DIXON

MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE

FREDERICK KENSETT

ANTONI TAPIES

MORRIS GRAVES

MARK TOBEY

HENRI MATISSE

CLAUDE LE LORRAINE

KEHINDE WILEY

James Turrell

Andy Goldsworthy

Barbara Hepworth

Bridget Riley

, 

... a unified and balanced field of visual sensation which, at the same time, is organised dynamically in terms of individual colours. 

similar and contrasting colours in a way that sustains a saturated intensity of colour across the entire picture plane...

ART: Kehinde Wiley Retrospective at Brooklyn Museum

Riotous, controlled, excessive, Dionysian… I've always responded viscerally to Wiley's work, detouring and excusing the superficiality, pastiche.  Roberta Smith's #tags are a helpful reset : " conceptually provocative…thin, indifferently worked surfaces (because he uses lots of helpers)..ecstatic interplay of cultures…exposure of bigotry…contemporarily seductive…raises issues about workshop production and the role of the artist..formula of repeating elements (decoration, pose, garments, props…)". (NYT)

They do make me laugh, and having known as many young black people as I did, I find them poignant. So grand, crazy, a display of status, power, all conveyed by a rigid, brittle and deeply fashionable style, mocking its pretensions while taking delightful revenge is having it all.  

I also value the art-history references, perhaps overmuch, but they do balance the social instrumentalism problem of artistic intention. 

ART; Perceptual Painters Group

 Elizabaeth O'Brien, downloaded from Perceptual Painters newsletters

I found this group though FB networking. They are a group of figurative realists concerned with observation, "seeing", valuing, plain air and perceptual painting approaches drawn from Impressionism, American Luminism, Edward Dickinson, Charles Henry Hawthorne, and Henry Ensche, I think.  

Elizabeth O'Brien reminds me of Charles Burchfield in mood, tone, and palette. 

Wonderfully engaging composition and delicate moody color sense.

ART: In Search of Painting Instruction

Last week I networked a Facebook group recommended to me by a former teacher.  She had taught a complicated color theory program that seemed to promise limitless sources of luminosity.  I had become obsessed with the exercises, enjoying the discipline and spectacle of mixing color.  What endless pleasure I get from seeing the magic of color changes.  

That group was the Students of Henry Hensche, who was a Provincetown teacher espousing Charles Hawthorne, an influential teacher also, with roots in American Realism and Tonalism.

I wish I liked Hensche's Impressionist-derived paintings.  It's even harder to like much of his students' work.  It's very high key, strident, and plodding genre landscapes. Some of the colorists remind me of Pierre Bonnard's vivid palette, though Monet's 4 Poplars seems to be the main inspiration - its orange and blue color harmony is endlessly used by HH students to give a kind of unhealthy high key glow to their work, as if it had gotten an airbrush suntan treatment.    

What seemed important was HH's emphasis on plein air discipline and perceptual training, observing color and nuance and translating it from a visual perception to the canvas.

One of the individuals recommended the Perceptual Painters Group, a contemporary realist group making very lovely work.  They send a newsletter which I enjoy seeing very much.  So good to know all these painters in the heritage of American Luminist Realism exist. 

ART: Autry Museum; Floral Beadwork & Masters of the American West Art Exhibit

On a grace-filled southern California winter's day, white branches of the sycamores triangulate our singularly blue skies. A remarkable and moving exhibit of women's artistry and patience calls me. And I want to see the Western paintings chosen for exhibit  - what's seen as exemplary, worthy of sale?

NATIVE AMERICAN FLORAL BEADWORK EXHIBITION

What happened to the culture of Native North Americans during encūentro is similar to that of other societies whose patrimonies held rich worlds of unique beauty and identity.

octopus beaded bag

European missionaries and traders introduced glass beads, fabric dyes, yarns, craft and art techniques, and Christianity throughout the world. Indigenous products began to be manufactured for trade and collection, the designs modified and interpreted to suit occidental, colonial tastes.  The authentic cultural product was just too strange and uncomfortable, too powerful evidence of the exploitation and domination taking place. 

And yet the beauty remains, the humanity manifest, immanent.

online photo

So we have Chinese and Japanese export ceramics, Indonesian and Indian textiles, African ivory figurines, Hawai'ian quilts, Samoan-style tattoos. 

Native Americans already beaded with shells, porcupine quills, seeds, and bones, mostly with geometric and abstract symbols that were deeply connected to their religious practices.  

Now their beadwork designs began to use trade beads and include secular European floral motifs. But the Native Americans combined them with their own cosmological symbols.  Frequently a cross that symbolizes the cardinal directions is worked into the overall design, for instance.

photo from Cree art reference website, Birmingham Museum

This is a Cree head-covering designed for wear by women attending Christian churches. The sides would limit peripheral vision and conceal much of the face and hair, like a nun's coif, the similar purpose. In the center of each rose winding around the face appears the cardinal directions symbol, retained and integrated into the design.  It's one of the most moving objects in the exhibit, symbolic of how  Native Americans at once submitted and sustained their culture even as their world was destroyed.

photo retained from online search

Even more evocative is the collection of moccasins.  A large group fills one wall, decorated soft foot coverings.  In most of them, one can see the shapes of toes and arches retained by supple buckskin.  Sometimes one is slightly larger than its mate, revealing the anatomical disparity of foot size or the preferred lead walking foot.

Where do those feet tread now?  I hope they may be wind spirits, that I can put my face up to them and tell them that we venerate them in our tragically compromised fashion.  


WESTERN ARTISTS YEARLY SALE EXHIBITION

George Carlson, Witness of Time

Contemporary western genre art to be seen here, mostly cowboy and Indian portraits and historical action narratives.  I want to like them, and do, but it's the landscapes that I will love unequivocally. 

The paintings are beautifully well-executed, unabashedly realist, detailed, lovely warm-toned images, leaving me impressed by the painters' mastery of technique. So what's not to like?  They are attractive, innocent. It's not about liking. So I worry.

Are they perhaps clichéd, grounded in sentimental populist nostalgia, less authentic as a consequence?  There is also the problem of intentionally or unintentionally commodifing Native Americans, and Western history itself. 

Jay Lipking, Young Girl, Profile

I love Western movies, but why paint them? Narrative genre painting is trumped by historical photography and then marginalized  by modern cinema. Photographs by Edward Curtis, a George Catlin painting; I feel on more authentic ground with these. So there is is: the compromised intention makes for compromised results.

I think landscape painting seems to be on more stable political and artistic ground. The earth and its natural beauty are ageless metaphors for spirituality and transcendence, identity,survival, the American frontier and way of life. They are especially poignant as we live with the reality of the degraded beauty of wilderness. 

An artist who chooses landscape, eschewing abstraction, can still be viable, though perhaps will never be fully appreciated in today's commercial museum scene. 

These are the landscape painters I most admired in the exhibit:

Lon Chmeil, Unseasonable

Jerry Lipking, Riders, Vermilion Cliffs

Jay Moore, Moonlit Night

George Carlson, Witness of Time

Lon Chmeil, Geological Illusion

Carole Cooke, Mist over Logan Pass

Carole Cooke, Windswept

BOOK COMMENTS: CADILLAC DESERT, by Marc Reisner

After seeing Glen Canyon Dam, I continued my readings on the American West. Cadillac Desert was the book which has made me despair most. Though written about 20 years ago, it provides an overview of the appalling story of American water development and use.  

At 68 I remain naive. The huge downside of open democracy is that its combination of consumerism, rapacious advanced industrial capitalism and human impulse control failure has produced a consumptive short-sightedness, a failure of vision that leads only to the dark. (See book, The 6th Extinction).  

Even more disgusting is how the institutions of society fail to function effectively.  I warned you, naive.  Foolish elementary school Catholic idealism. 

John Wesley Powell called for a political division of the West based on its existing river-watershed-drainages. But capitalism can do little that is sensible, stunted as it is by its pernicious policy of discounting the future. 

First the West was stripped of its pelted animals,its bison herds decimated. Healthy protein, in retrospect, but the calf was golden. Railroad rights-of-way artificially divided western lands, and eager, ill-informed, unexperienced newcomers acquired 160 acre parcels of arid desert to farm. The Mormons were the only group with enough co-operative structure to build private functional irrigation systems, but those models were ignored as water need, rights and use quickly became the great looming reality. 


Weather cycles of wet/dry, so deeply misunderstood and ignored by almost all stakeholders, soon caused landowners of all sizes to fail.  And so the giant program to provide subsidized water to the great West began, though Powell had warned that should all the water in the West be distributed over the territory, it would cover it to a depth of 2 inches. 

Teton Dam Collapse, June 5, 1976

Dams were built in response to growing population needs. Never before was so much promised to so many. TGTBT! Congress members quickly arranged lucrative irrigation programs which provided cheap water for farming, on land that was marginal or not, for crops that were mostly inappropriate. 

In the long run, silting would make the dams useless, salination would reduce crop yields, small farms would be acquired by huge corporations, wildlife and fish populations would be decimated, and thousands of square miles of wild rivers and canyons drowned under suburban-style lakes and reservoirs.

Water is provided at deeply subsidized prices to agribusiness, crops are subsidized by price supports, and American business and bureaucracy has simply learned to "farm the government". 

The American economy is deeply compromised by this support system; the irony of conservative complaints about "socialism" is richly available in the West, as "lone individualist" western lifestyles are touted by landowners benefitting from the generosity and short-term economic thinking of American taxpayers, their elected officials, and agribusiness interests.

The very practice of individualism has become a commodity.  That hectoring, grouchy Thoreau was all too correct and John Wesley Powell's tears mingle with the infrequent rains that fall from western skies on the stupendous monstrosity of civilization we've made.

Very little consolation is available.  I get in my gas-guzzling Jeep, drive over svelte highway systems right up to the red rock canyons, hop out wearing a bug-proofed shirt, hiking boots that John Muir would die for, protein bars, a camel-siphon instant water system, and go for a hike. Utterly impossibly compromised.  God may forgive, but Mother Nature will not.