Dutch Utopia exhibit at Telfair Museum

Savannah's Telfair Museum of Art has just opened an unusual and most interesting exhibition, Dutch Utopia. Using art already in the Museum's permanent holdings as a springboard, curator Holly Koons McCullough and her team have assembled a large number of works by American artists who worked in artists' colonies and small unspoiled villages in the Netherlands during the second half of the nineteenth century.

There are plenty of canvases large and small by artists who remain well known today, from John Singer Sargent to Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. Then there are the delights to be savoured thanks to many artists whose names are less familiar today, from George Hitchcock to accomplished women artists like Anna Stanley and Elizabeth Nourse. Traditional compositions of landscape or interiors suddenly change to daring works which feel much more contemporary to us today. Watercolours hold their own with oils on canvas, some huge. It is an interesting mix of works and takes one to a totally different time and place, in a tight society living beneath amazingly luminous Northern skies, where wind and sea dictate every aspect of life and, according to one contemporary comment, there is a great deal of the colour blue in sunlight. The American artists lived there for varying lengths of time, but they all seemed to concentrate on eliminating from their work any hints of the changes that Europe had been undergoing as the Industrial Revolution reached its zenith. The Holland they portray had barely changed from the work Rembrandt and Franz Hals knew.

I found myself contrasting many of the scenes of Dutch women, be-coiffed and be-clogged, monumental and utterly Northern, with those by the Pont Aven school of artists who were depicting the Breton women with their typical coiffes and, yes, clogs too, on occasion. Working at about the same time, Gaugin, Sérusier, Emile Bernard and a host of other French artists were working in the sleepy little Brittany towns of Pont Aven or Le Pouldu. They were, to my eye, far more adventurous in their approaches than the Americans in the Netherlands, but each community produced some wonderful art.

The Ghost Story, 1887, Oil on canvas, Walter MacEwen , (Image courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio)

In Holland, 1887,Oil on canvas, Gari Melchers
Gari Melchers Home and Studio, Fredericksburg, Virginia

The Telfair's exhibition runs until January 10th, 2010, before moving to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands.
It is well worth seeing at one of its venues.

"The 10,000-Hour Rule" for Art?

I was reading a piece by Malcolm Gladwell about the "10,000 Hour Rule" talked about by scientists. Gladwell, author of the bestsellers Tipping Point and Blink, has also written about the secrets of successful people in his recent book, Outliers: the Story of Success. The 10,000 hours in question are linked, it seems, to achieving success in no matter what field. Whether it is writing, computer programming, composing music or creating art, it apparently applies.

I deduce a simple, forceful message for artists from this: no matter what your medium, practice, practice, practice. You may or may not initially have huge artistic talent, but the message is that if you apply yourself intelligently and diligently to creating art, you can and will become a better artist. I find that both challenging and encouraging. The "Painting a Day" movement is really a marvellous step towards this concept, and one all artists should try and embrace, even if the results are not put on the Web. All the artists one sees going around in public spaces, a drawing book in hand, or quickly catching some scene with deft lines, are doing themselves a huge favour too.

Now that I have publicly reminded myself what I should be doing this very moment, I must be off to do some silverpoint drawing!

An example of one-a-day-Painting

“Nature, however beautiful, is not art.”

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The Coming of Night at Keckliko, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, 1920s

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In Martha R. Severens’ book on Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, An Artist, a Place and a Time, (http://www.gibbesmuseum.org/) she quotes Birge Harrison saying that “Nature, however beautiful, is not art. Art is natural beauty interpreted through human temperament”. This was a tenet Alice Ravenel Huger Smith kept very much in mind when she was painting her luminous watercolors of the Low Country around Charleston.

It is an observation that constantly resonates with me as I try to interpret the landscapes of coastal Georgia or places I visit in Europe. What to select first, when one is choosing a scene? How to portray the subject one has chosen? What medium is best? Why is one attracted to that scene chosen – what makes it so special that one wants to spend time and energy depicting it?

Working plein air is a wonderful exercise in humility. The light changes, the insects bite, one loses the initial spark of excitement, the wind blows – so many challenges! But if one keeps on going and tries to remember why that scene called out to be drawn or painted, somehow one struggles on through to some form of conclusion. Later, the studio is the place for consideration and evaluation of what one has tried to accomplish. Watercolor and silverpoint drawings are both unforgiving so it is hard to make many changes. Nonetheless, sometimes, the natural beauty does get interpreted in successful fashion and the landscape painting or drawing works out. That leaves me with a good feeling and makes me all the more eager to go out looking for the next installment of “beautiful nature”.