Rendering life itself

Sitting this evening in the Rotunda Gallery of the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, I was listening to violinist Daniel Hope and his friends create the most wonderful chamber music on the second day of the Savannah Music Festival. Around me on the walls of the museum were works of art large and small from the museum collection, dating mainly from the late 19th or early 20th century.

I thought back to a quote I had read by Roger H. Boulet, that "Life's ephemeral quality has always been evoked by artists". Composers and visual artists alike strive to convey their visions of life itself, or what they perceive that life to be in time. The searing passion and serene beauty of Samuel Barber's Adagio from String Quartet seemed to be the epitomy of Boulet's quote. Dvorak's Piano Quintet in A Major was full of romantic energy and melody: it echoed in feel some of the paintings on the museum walls that harked back to earlier, perhaps less complex times.

For each artist, rendering life itself is complex, intensely personal and usually the result of passion, technical skill and tenacity. Working out what you want to say in paint, pencil, music or any other medium is one thing; finding the right vehicle through which to express that message is another thing. Sometimes an artist knows clearly, ahead of time, what the work of art will be like. I find on occasion that I can envisage clearly the drawing or painting I want to do, down to a very detailed level, and yet, when I actually work on the piece, it inevitably acquires its own life and dictates to me how to proceed. In a way, I feel this is "rendering life itself", because life is flowing through me to the artwork and back again, to form an ongoing dialogue. The act of creating art (and I am sure, music or any other medium) is one part one's own will and input, but two parts the energy and life emanating from the piece being created. One always hears of novelists talking of their characters becoming "alive" and telling the author how to proceed in the novel. And yet, in each case, the act of creation is reflecting life's ephemeral quality as it is a moment in time: that art will never again be created in quite the same way.

The music I was lucky enough to hear performed this evening was definitely a wonderful sampling of art created to celebrate and render unique and fugitive moments in time. We are the richer for this music, just as we are richer for the other arts we inherit and enjoy in the world community.

The energy of art

During a visit to South Carolina to see the recently-opened exhibition from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales, Turner to Cezanne, at the Columbia Museum of Art, I was struck afresh at the energy and magic created by art.

Not only was the exhibit a delight, with small canvases of great interest and often great beauty, but the whole experience of seeing the show was fascinating. The exhibition galleries were thronged with excited, but well behaved school children being taken around by docents. Their energy and fresh reactions to the art were a delight to be a part of as one looked at the art more slowly than they were able to. In amongst the school groups were numerous adults, clearly enjoying and appreciating the exhibition too. Why did I find this so striking ? Well, apparently this is the the most important show the Columbia Museum of Art and its supporters have brought to the city, and despite the current economy, the response from the public has been massive. In the first week already, the museum has seen huge numbers of visitors, both local and from elsewhere.

To me, the public excitement generated by this exhibition reminds one again how art brings people together and strengthens communities. By the time my husband and I had emerged from the museum, we had talked to countless people and even exchanged addresses with new friends. Each painting in the exhibition, from France mainly, but also from England, Wales, Belgium and Holland, quietly or dramatically "spoke" of different landscapes and places, different people and their mores, diverse optics on life in general - all a wonderfully subtle and beguiling way of learning of other lands, their history and culture. Each artist, whether it was Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Manet, Pissarro, Whistler, Renoir or Cezanne, passionately told of their experiences and convictions, beauties and visions.

Jospeh Mallord William Turner Margate Jetty, National Museum of Wales

People were smiling, obviously interested and learning, marvelling at different aspects of the art. In other words, the visit to the exhibition moved visitors, made them feel better and made their day special.

What a perfect prescription - go to see an art exhibition to make one feel energetic, inspired and even joyous!

Shadows

I recently reread the quote, "There is no beauty without shadows", from Junichiro Tanizaki's 1933 slender book, In Praise of Shadows. Tanizaki was, in part, contrasting the Western and Japanese concepts of beauty, amongst other subjects. Shadows for him represented the obliqueness of nature-based arts, weathered naturalness, the play of light on moss, a single candle light bringing alive black lacquer flecked with gold or silver - in other words, the subtle, understated traditional versions of beauty so esteemed in former times in Japan.

His celebration of transient beauty found in shadows made me remember all the Japanese woodcuts with which I grew up. My grandparents lost everything in the 1923 earthquake and fire in Yokohama, Japan. My grandfather stayed on for two years afterwards to help in the city's reconstruction. In order to help the devastated Japanese artist community, he and other Western businessmen clubbed together to commission a series of woodcut prints, based on traditional Ukiyo-E (pictures of the floating world), from a group of artists. A set of prints came to East Africa with my grandfather and graced the wall of the home in which I lived in Tanzania. In these woodcuts, the shadows are subtle, elusive and allusive. From this art, I learned that shadows are really far more revealing than light.

A Japanese Beauty, after Kogyo Terasaki, woodcut (Jeannine Cook collecton)

As an artist myself, I love the abstract underpinnings of a drawing or painting created by the play of shadows. It is like magic: you try to capture the fleeting shadows on a flower, a tree, a landscape, and suddenly, from this seemingly inchoate medley of darks, you have a comprehensible image. The gradations of shadow are also endlessly revealing, describing the object in space. Within those shadows too, are so many colours, local, reflected, warm, cool - you can look and look and always learn more. Next time you are glorying in a sunny day, look at the shadows and marvel. Tanizaki was right to say, "There is no beauty without shadows."

Personal signatures

For anyone, not just an artist, standing out from the crowd is increasingly difficult. Too many people, often crowded together in busy places, mostly wearing the same types of clothes, all buyers of the same consumer goods. No wonder artists need to dream up really unusual angles to get noticed and become successful. The same is true, really, of anyone trying to do anything, especially in the creative world.

An interesting commentary on the different ways people try to distinguish themselves in society is an exhibition now showing at La Salle University Art Museum in Philadelphia entitled Second Skin. The artist, Susan Moore, does drawings of people in faint charcoal, but then paints or draws in ink bold tattoos, burns or scars on these body images. She is highlighting how people are rebelling against our increasingly grey and uniform world by trying to distinguish themselves, to give themselves a clear identity, by using, for instance, tattoos. Moore also underscores the ironic fact that the more people use tattoos, themselves a real mish-mash of images taken from a wide variety of sources, the more they actually rejoin the common crowd from whom they were seeking to distinguish themselves. In fact, they are rather following the tribal practices of scarification on face or body to proclaim their membership of a tribe or group, submerging personal identity into that of a larger group. Susan Moore certainly found a thought-provoking theme for her exhibition of drawings, as well as a very skillful way to distinguish herself with her dramatic drawings.

Studio view, Susan Moore artist (Image courtesy of the artist)

When silence is the better path

In the dialogue between artist and the public about work created, there is often a time when silence is preferable. There was a perfect example of this premise this morning during a NPR Weekend Edition interview Scott Simon did with Israeli composer, Avner Dorman. Mr. Dorman was talking about his compositions and how he reacts when they are played by individual musicians and/or orchestras. Whilst orchestras are usually very structured in their interpretation of the music, thanks to the conductor, he remarked that he frequently stays silent when soloists begin working with his compositions. He finds that often these musicians find other aspects in his work he had not been aware of (thanks to their own life experiences), and consequently, he does not intervene to talk to them of his music until late in the process. He referred to his compositions as "living organisms", with their own independent life.

In the same way, visual art has an independent life and should be able to survive on its own, to have a dialogue with each viewer that is meaningful. In fact, many artists find it invidious that artists' statements are so often requested to accompany paintings, drawings or other media before an exhibition. The work should, ideally, be able to stand alone, allowing a dialogue with viewers that is not guided by the artist. In other words, again, silence could often be ideal. Perhaps lack of confidence on the part of many in the viewing public about what to think and what to look at or for in visual art contributes to the need for an explanatory guide to understanding the art. However, learning to trust one's inner voice or instincts is a wonderful addition to enjoying art, music and so many other things in life. It is part of defining oneself as a human being, just as the artist, in creating the work, had to remain true to his or her artistic identity.

Wheat Field with Cypresses, Vincent van Gogh, (Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum)

Artists' dialogues with viewers

Defining yourself as an artist is really only one side of the equation in art. The other side is what each viewer brings to your art by way of life experiences which will influence that act of viewing. That mix of experience will complete the dialogue the artist started by creating a piece of art. Viewer and artist, the inseparable pair. And every dialogue will be different, which makes the whole process endlessly fascinating.

Ideally, an artist's vision will afford meanings and evocations of aspects of life far beyond the mere life-like rendering of whatever subject matter. But since each viewer's experience of life is individual, he or she will interpret the artist's work slightly differently. Often, when there is a great enough consensus about a piece of art, then it will be recognised as good art. However, as with everything else, each generation has a somewhat different set of criteria for art, based on that time, and so there are often revisions and fashions in esteem for art. As Sir Michael Levey, the late Director of Britain's National Gallery, was quoted in ArtNews (March 2009) as once remarking about the National Gallery's version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, "It stands like a beacon of yellow fire, reminding us that outside the museum, art is always evolving – we only have to look" (my italics). Artists and viewers alike have to remember that those vital dialogues are endlessly changing and evolving as the years go by.

Fourth version, exhibited at the National Gallery, London, 1880s, Vincent v an Gogh, (Imae courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum)

On a personal basis, I have found it totally fascinating to work with other artists and see the diversity in the resultant art, even when using the same subject matter. The most obvious example is when a group shares a model for life drawing: each person's drawing will be utterly different. Similar diversities will occur when those drawings are viewed, for each viewer will dialogue with each drawing in an individual fashion. Each viewer may respond to the artist's intensity, vitality and power to evoke beyond the merely descriptive, but there will be a very personal resonance for each person. And yet, even within the narrow confines of life drawing as one aspect of art, there is an implicit message. For any art to endure, it must be true to the spirit of its own age. Today, that art needs to be able to sustain a dialogue with viewers who are saturated with vivid imagery from so many sources, digital or otherwise, and whose life experiences are vastly different from those of even the previous generation. Artists, implicitly, need to dig deeper and work harder than ever before to sustain a rich dialogue with viewers. Quite a challenge!

More on identity

Yesterday, I mused about the role of drawing in defining one's identity as an artist. Unlike painting, with its more elaborate statement and stage-like set-up, drawing allows an artist to explore and lay out all sorts of different ideas. There is often more flexibility and honesty shown in a drawing, which reveals the artist more readily.

Daring to draw and reveal an inner core requires an act of trust for the artist. Trust that one's own voice will come through and show the artist to be an individual, with a personal style. Basically a high wire act on many occasions, but worth the effort. The more one draws, the more one learns to trust that eye coordination with hand, the inner voice which dictates which marks to make, what to include, what to omit.

Drawing marathons help too - if you push yourself beyond the limit, as in any other discipline, you discover new strengths, new horizons as an artist. You refine who you are as a draughtsman and, by extension, who you are as an artist.

Photo of New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture - New York, home to Drawing Marathons (Image courtesy of Yelp.com)

Defining your identity as an artist

Defining yourself as an artist is a lifelong endeavour. Each of us aspires to have a singular voice, a hallmark style and an artistic identity unlike anyone else. Achieving one's own style as an artist is complex, on-going and both technical and psychological. First of all, I believe, it has to do with defining who you are as a person and what you want to say, overall, through your art. It also has to do with hanging on to your belief in yourself, being willing always to learn and adapt, but nonetheless, being true to your own core identity. Sometimes that can be hard, especially when tough economic times demand lots of compromises.

One tool which I find very useful to help me define my identity is drawing. Whether it is with charcoal, graphite, pen and ink, conte crayon, chalk or silverpoint, it does not matter. It is the act of drawing that helps strip things down to bare bones, to try to get at the core of what I am trying to say. In other words, to define my art and thus to define me as an artist. Drawing is a tool with two rather different uses. The first is to make a finished drawing, a work of art that stands alone. The second is to draw small, quick studies for composition, distribution of lights and darks, etc. in preparation for a painting.

Lot Drunk, Rembrandt, 1632

Rembrandt, Jesus and the Adultress

Drawing, unlike painting, is a direct, spontaneous act, indicative of emotions and thoughts in fresh and unadorned fashion. Many of the great Old Master drawings will leave errors and show corrections - a new line of a cheekbone on top of one that was off in proportion, an arm which has changed position slightly since the first line was put down, a tangle of lines where the artist was thinking of how to depict something or even blobs of ink where the pen "misbehaved". Rembrandt had many a tussle with his pens and ink but very frequently, that drawing could be readily recognised as one done by Rembrandt.

Try using drawing, any drawing, as a pathway to defining more clearly who you are as an artist. It is often a surprising and enlightening exercise - and fun as well.

Is creating art a process of discovery?

It is often said that curiosity lies at the heart of all good art. Frequently, one has an idea about a subject to paint or draw, and the next thought is: why not try it in such and such a way technically, what if one includes x or y subject matter, or what if one approaches the subject altogether differently? In other words, how best to convey the inspiration? Since most artists are innately curious and observant, each drawing or painting turns into a voyage of discovery. Every piece of art has its own "voice" as well. So the artwork will, in essence, tell the artist how to draw or paint it. It is a question of being open, intuitive and attuned to what is happening on the canvas or paper.

Whatever the art being created, the artist will learn from the process of painting or drawing. I find that when I am doing a silverpoint drawing, I observe closely the subject I am depicting, partly because I want to understand it better but also because I am mindful that silverpoint is a severe taskmaster. You cannot erase the lines you make with the silver stylus on the prepared paper, so you live with what you put down. It is a good discipline because you try to understand the subject matter in order then to draw spontaneously. That spontaneity leads in turn to a stronger evocation of the subject.  Just as in other media, the silverpoint drawing technique should be the "silent partner" in the art making duo, playing the important but supporting role to the artist's curiosity and passion which engendered the art in the first place.

Think of Vincent Van Gogh's passionate curiosity. He embarked on extraordinary voyages of discovery every time he started a new painting, whether it was landscapes and scenes in and around Paris, Sunflowers, Dr. Gachet, the Yellow House or Cypresses. Each painting taught him something new and led him on to the next one in his headlong fevered creativity. 

The Yellow House, 1888, oil, Vincent van Gogh, (Image courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amerstdam)

Each of us, as artists, aspires to retain that freshness and energy needed to exercise curiosity, to go on voyages of discovery. Those voyages can lead to the creation of good art.

Does "a biological sense of place" help in creating art?

Yesterday, I alluded to the question that I kept thinking about when I was working as Artist in Residence in Dinan, Brittany, through Les Amis de la Grande Vigne: does it help an artist to know well the area when he or she is painting, either en plein air, or creating work that is connected to a sense of place?

I think that a sense of comfort and familiarity frees up the artist to concentrate more on the actual art. It is really almost the same as "terroir", the biological sense of place that wine-growers talk of when they refer to specific geographical areas dictating certain characteristics in the wine produced from those regions. If you intrinsically know the place where you are working as an artist, you know, almost intuitively, the possible plays of light on the scene, the patterns, the rhythms of tides or seasons, the soils, the type of plants that grown there, etc. Because you already have this knowledge deep inside you, you can factor things in more easily as you are working. Understanding how the area "functions" means that you are not struggling so much to convey its character when you are drawing or painting.

Claude Monet is perhaps one of the most famous artists who used his sense of place, or "terroir", to allow him to produce extraordinary art. Starting with his famous series of 25 paintings of Haystacks, for instance, in 1890, Monet got to know those stacks of hay in all their times of day and weather.

Haystacks - Snow Effect, 1891, Claude Monet (Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum)

His interest in producing series of paintings continued almost unabated until the end of his life in 1926. He explored the different aspects of Poplars along the river banks in all weather and times of day. Rouen Cathedral was another series which showed his fascination with this mighty structure in its amazing diversities of light. Perhaps the most celebrated, in terms of his sense and knowledge of place, is his huge body of work , "Les Nympheas", painted at his home, Giverny, based on the waterlilies growing in the pond he created. There are 250 canvases in the series, many showing his eyesight problems with cataracts. Nonetheless, his knowledge of Giverny was almost visceral, since he had virtually created the place. This familiarity allowed him to paint masterpieces that have captivated the world ever since.

Monet's example makes a very good case for an artist to get to know an area as thoroughly as possible when creating art. Maybe "terroir" is as desirable for artists as it is for wine-growers!