Subtitle: Stop the Gardner expansion!

Sebastian Smee writes an excellent call for the trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston to think again before the continue with their plans for an ultra-modern expansion by Renzo Piano. (This article struck me like a thunderbolt. Too bad the title of it doesn't match Smee's impassioned plea. My subtitle would be better.)

Just as it did in her day, Gardner's palace museum still invites us to turn our back on the driving rationalism of modern life: on standardization, on uniform lighting, on the rush to embrace the new. We are invited to enter through an exterior that is deliberately reserved and opaque, whereupon we find ourselves in the most extraordinary sanctuary - a place of mystery and medievalism, of marvels and eccentricities: a jumble of anachronisms that bizarrely combines aspects of a Venetian palazzo, an enclosed medieval garden, and a monastic cloister.

That is about to change.

I love the old museums that do not look like cafeterias. My favorites have been the Gardner, the Morgan Library, and the Barnes. Are you seeing a pattern? All three of these museums have felt the need to accommodate the rush of visitors and all three have turned to architectural schemes that destroyed the special character that made them, well, special. Two of them are even using the same architect (Piano, who is actually great when he's not making high-end malls for the viewing of art).

I'm hoping the Gardner caretakers can find a different solution.

Watteau's world

I'm reading Jed Perl's "Antoine's Alphabet," a book about the French painter Antoine Watteau. Perl makes an alphabetical attempt at putting Watteau at the center of modern Western painting. Every letter of the alphabet has entries that range from informative to descriptive to tangential. Under "F," for example, Perl writes about Fans, Flaubert, Flirtation, Fragments, and Friendship. Some of the entries are just anecdotes from Perl's life that have to do with Watteau's themes; others are stories about people indebted to Watteau or concerned about his influence. And what is Watteau all about? This paragraph struck me as an enticement:

The human mind is artless, elegant, clumsy, penetrating, chaotic, obscure, a hopeless mix of serenity and hysteria, the lofty and the low-down, clarity and murk, and Watteau pulls his drawings and paintings straight out of this messy material, these moment-to-moment shifts in perception, apprehension, and feeling. His paintings suggest a mind that is, like all our minds, at once self-indulgent, unreliable, relentless, lucid, obtuse, unruly. And like the rest of us he allow his thoughts to drift, his moods to shit, his focus to go out of focus. We've all woken up in the morning feeling blue and then, an hour later, unaccountably, felt cheerful. Or vice versa. We know what it means to be confounded by our own emotions. Watteau's working methods, so far as we can see, mingled long periods of meditation and periods of frantic labor. He was willing to fuss over small things and do big things quickly, and by utilizing this erratic approach, he somehow managed to transcribe the vagaries of the human mind onto canvas, giving the painting a psychological texture like nothing else in the history of art. We accept Watteau's opacitites and obscurities becase we know what it is like to find ourselves, in the midst of even the simplest task, thinking about something entirely different.

Davenport's Balthus

I just finished reading Guy Davenport's A Balthus Notebook. Lots of instigation in this book, and I thought I'd share one bit, if only because it speaks to my newfound love of cave painting:

Centuries before Plato beauty was a kind of good, and the appreciation of it a pleasure. Beauty has also traditionally been an outward sign of the soul's beauty. Balthus integrates this ancient tradition with Darwinian naturalism (beauty as sexual attraction). Darwin suspected that there was always "something left over" after sexual attractiveness has done its work, and that this something was what we call beauty, and that it may have given rise to art. The grace of line in a Lascaux horse is not the horse, but something that has been abstracted from it.

Clapping music

Thanks to Matt, I'm rediscovering the music of Steve Reich. I liked his pieces from the 1970s and '80s, and then somewhere around "The Cave," I stopped listening. I found the classic piece from 1972 "Clapping Music" in its many permutations on YouTube. So much of Reich's music from this time is about phasing, the musical technique of repeating the same pattern in different tempos. To me, you can get a similar effect by playing Reich's music at slightly different times. You can phase his phasing in and out.

So here are six embedded videos to phase in and out as you please. You can press stop and play and do the same thing Steve Reich used to spend hours doing when he was cutting tape.

Autumn

I finally finished the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail (OCA). This trail follows the path of the old water delivery service between the Croton Aqueduct and New York City. The aqueduct went 29 miles from bucolic natural land, through the suburbs of Westchester County, and ended in the city. The aqueduct is no longer used, but the land it was on has been wisely converted into a long trail that serves as an escape from the hectic congestion of New York. Beginning in the Bronx and going in a fairly straight shot, one can feel many miles away from hte world of concrete, taxis and construction.

Before Iris was born, I walked about 20 miles of the trail. Since then, I haven't had the opportunity to finish the OCA. Last week, however, Iris was in daycare and there was a clear sky and moderate temperatures. I pounced on the opportunity to walk in the woods.

Getting off the commuter train at Scarborough, I picked up the trail and immediately realized I had chosen the best time possible to walk the OCA. The woods were ablaze; leaves were falling and in full fall splendor. I reached for my camera right away, but to my chagrin realized I'd forgotten it. So I decided to make some sketches in the little sketchbook I always carry with me. Every so often, I'd stop and do a quick scratchy sketch of something that caught my eye. But these weren't enough. There was something of my experience of the trail that was missing: COLOR.

I began grabbing leaves from the ground and looking very closely at them. I was amazed at the variation, of course, but also how the variations spoke to a lot of my current artistic concerns.

Off symmetry: Autumn leaves can look like Rorschach tests. Green splots mirror each other on brown leaves, almost perfect mirrors - but not quite. There are slight variations on the symmetry that makes the leaves more dynamic and alive, in process. There is a classical beauty to symmetry, and the variations make them seem more in motion.

Soft and hard: When I would bend down to pick up a particularly interesting leaf, I frequently wouldn't know if I was going to feel something brittle or soft. Leaves on the ground are dying and turning crunchy, but frequently they were soft and wilted. Usually the darkest browns, reds and purples would feel dry and the lightest greens and yellows would be moist. But it's not always the case. Feeling a yellow leaf with dark brown edges is always surprising and intimate. One gets to know where the leaf is in its life.

Two colors: Like an exercise by Joseph Albers, leaves can "fool" your eyes. I picked up an ocher leaf and thought it had blue spots. I looked closely and found the spots to be a different color when isolated, a more neutral green. But these two colors together effect each other in our mind in ways that aren't true. No color lives in isolation.

Edges: My paintings are always exercises in how edges are formed. Do colors bleed into one another, forming a soft boundary, or do they sit next to each other with hard boundaries? This is an untrue question. Look at an impressionist painting and you know why. Those pointillist canvases of little flecks of color are thousands of "hard" color decisions that add up to a soft effect. The idea of an edge truly depends on perspective, and I was surprised at how the microscopic colors of leaves reinforce this idea. Look at the spine of a leaf and you might be surprised to find how the leaf's colors reinforce the hard edges. For instance, a dark brown spine might look dark only because there's a soft border of yellow that bleeds into an equally dark brown on the leaf.

Complements: Thank you, thank you! No, really. Please, I don't deserve all this adulation. Stop. Who told Mother Nature that green and red are complements? And yellow and purple? Is it coincidence that color theory, which says complements make each other more intense, complements the color of leaves when they're at their most brilliant?

Line: Leaves can have such an astounding color rhythm. But it probably shouldn't have surprised me how much of the color is determined by the structure. One can look at a leaf like a painting and see the Renaissance war between desegno and colore. It all comes back to Venice and Florence! The Italian masters were forever debating what makes a painting special -- the way it's designed and laid out or its use of color? Thankfully, leaves provide a very clear answer: these ideas are inseparable. The most beautifully colored leaves come from a relationship with the way the veins unfold.

I could go on, but writing all of this makes me want to paint. Below is a painting I did after coming back from the trail, and the quick sketches I made in lieu of a picture machine. It's good to get out of the city once in a while.

Philip Guston's treadmill

I just finished Ross Feld's wonderful book "Guston in Time." Feld belongs to that line of poets like Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara that were deeply involved in visual art. He brings an incredible eye and descriptive power to Philip Guston's work and also a great asset: he was one of Guston's closest friends in the later years.

This book lays open the minds of two artists struggling to get at something in their work and arguing over what it means to create. The book is quite short, and much of it consists of letters between Guston and Feld. Guston had given up abstract painting and was considered a traitor by many in the art world. He said he could no longer spend his life just measuring whether a dab of red would suffice on the picture plane. Abstraction and "pure" picture-making held no more allure for him. He had to paint recognizable forms and figures.

Guston tells Feld about teaching at Boston University and watching a student trying to paint a mural with a clock in it. The student fussed over how to paint the clock, working a long time and re-working it over and over. In the end, says Guston, he went over to the mural and grabbed the student's brush. "You want a clock? Here's a clock!" he said, and painted in a crude clock.

I was quite taken by the following paragraph written by Guston. The underlining is all by the artist. At issue is why paint one thing over another. Why fuss over how to paint a particular form? Why paint at all? Guston says this:

Ross--what is creating--this forming anyway?!! A treadmill? Try to stay on it--throw off the dross--make the architecture and content impossible to take apart--not even 1/8 of an inch padded. Lean. Yet, working with images as I am attempting, makes all so unmanageable, chaotic, as well as baffling. And so unpredictable, which is why that 1/8 of an inch change of forms & spaces, transforms the meaning. I know I'm going in circles talking to you this way. (Musa [Guston's wife], in the next room, just said "Did I hear a big sigh?")

Well--perhaps one should remain satisfied just to stay on the treadmill--to remain on it--maybe that is all that is truly given to us. My God! A lifetime spent--to have a few innocent moments. To baffle oneself--to come in the studio next day and feel--"I did that?" Is this me--To catch oneself off-guard?

"You want a clock? Here's a clock!" Oh, if it were only as direct and simple as that!

Cave painting

While in the library a couple weeks ago, I came across Gregory Curtis's book "The Cave Painters." It's a slim volume that is an excellent introduction to the art produced in the caves of western Europe from 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. By the time I finished it, my mind was awash in ideas about my own painting and what it means to put paint to a surface. The strangest thing about the study of cave painting is that it's almost a forensic science. Anthropologists gather evidence, chart history, where things appear and how often. But there's an elephant in the room: why?

Why did people go to the caves to produce art? No one knows. And there is a stigma on the people who seriously study cave painting to actually create coherent theories as to why. The dominant thinking now is that we'll never understand why these paintings were created. I sympathize with this point of view. There's just not a lot of evidence. My regret is that I can't listen in to the lunchtime conversations of the people who study this stuff. There have to be interesting and provocative ideas out there that will never be published, just talked about.

The most fascinating thing to me is the evidence around how sophisticated the cave painters were. When you think about someone 30,000 years ago painting an animal the size of a Jackson Pollock painting 15 feet off the ground, it gets bewildering. They had to build scaffolding. There are still rope impressions from where the painters would jam would into rock crevasses. They had to pull in pigment. They had to create brushes. They had no light, and so needed illumination. And how did they learn to draw like that? A lot of recent research has proven the most impressive compositions weren't haphazard. They were planned and painted in to create the stunning overall effect we still get today. It's not an accident that we feel things upon seeing these paintings.

Towards the end of the book, after he narrates his visits to several caves, Curtis explains why anthropologists still copy art from the caves, even though photographic technology has never been better. It made me think of all my art classes where I had to copy work from other artists and all my surprise discoveries whenever I did it:

The art needs to be copied as well [as be inventoried]. Making copies is a long, often tedious process. In that way it is very much like an archaeological dig. And, like a dig, it is absolutely essential because, strange as it sounds, it is impossible to see the art merely by looking at the wall. The intense concentration copying requires reveals signs and images that were invisible before. Michel Lorblanchet, a distinguished prehistorian with considerable artistic talent, made copies in a cave named Pergouset. He had visited the cave more than twenty times, often with colleagues, and thought he knew it well. But when he began to make his copies, he discovered numerous animals and signs that hadn't been seen before, including a vulva some eighteen inches across that, once seen, becomes the first thing anyone notices on the wall. Lorblanchet worked in the cave for three years making copies. His copies show twelve horses, three reindeer, three mountain goats, one stag, a bison, an auroch, four undetermined animals, sixteen signs, the vulva mentioned above, and twelve undetermined traces. Years earlier, when Leroi-Gourhan visited the cave, he saw only an isolated mountain goat, a horse, and a bison. What Lorblanchet was able to see compared to what Leroi-Gourhan saw is the difference between copying and merely looking.

Below are a couple renderings by Henri Breuil, a new hero of mine. While he was working, the dominant theory about dating work from the caves was that there was a linear progression of art history. According to anthropologists at the time, so-called "primitive" work had to be done before more sophisticated work, since human beings get more and more cultured over time. Breuil, a religious man who took on the dominant Marxist-atheist anthropologist at the time, thought that life doesn't progress so cleanly. That certain people would choose a cruder, more raw style of painting. Over time, Breuil was vindicated and proven correct.

I've included just these images because I was charmed by them.