Artists' Expectations

When an artist travels to somewhere new, or goes out on location to work plein air, there is always a sense of expectation. Is that good, or does it hinder one's reactions and inspirations?

I was reminded of this frequent conundrum when I read a statement made by photographer Michael Eastman in Ivy Cooper's interesting article, "From Drive-Ins to Palazzo in ARTnews, summer 2010 issue. Eastman is considering travelling to Japan, New Zealand and Antarctica for new photographic ventures. When he mentioned this, the obvious question to ask was what subject matter will he photograph. His reply really resonated with me. "I'm not sure what I'll find there.

I think the biggest risk to an artist is expectations. (My emphasis) Whatever your expectations are, they always get in the way. If I don't have expectations, if I hit the ground running, if I move forward and start looking, I'll see new things."

When I thought about Eastman's remarks, I realised how accurate he is. I have found, time and time again, that if I switch off my brain when I arrive somewhere, and just let my subconscious 'float' and my eyes wander all over, then suddenly, bang, there is something interesting. If, on the other hand, I have envisaged some scene or object ahead of time, expecting to find that it is what I want to draw or paint, I frequently feel flat and uninspired when I get there. Totally perverse, but there it is! Of course, if one is commissioned to do a specific thing or landscape, then that is another matter. Even so, I try to feel neutral, without any preconceived idea of how I am going to tackle the commission. At least, like that, new angles, new approaches, fresh concepts can all come to mind.

If one thinks of the wonderfully spontaneous watercolours,for instance, that John Singer Sargent did when he was travelling, I suspect that he did not burden himself ahead of time of too many expectations. He just had his painting equipment to hand and let his keen eye spot the opportunities.

Artist in the Simplon, c.1909 - John Singer Sargent (Image courtesy of Fogg Museum (Harvard Art Museums), Cambridge, MA, US

This watercolour, Artist in the Simplon shows just such an approach. Sargent was following in the footsteps of an earlier master of watercolours, Winslow Homer. He had pioneered the use of watercolours for spontaneous, fluid work that showed an opportunistic artist's eye. English "Cloud Shadows", painted in 1890, is an example of this).

Cloud Shadows, Winslow Homer, oil on canvas, (Image courtesy of the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art)

Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, Winslow Homer   (Image courtesy of Portland Museum of Art)

Expectations, in most situations, tend to let one down. In art, they seem to dampen, even stifle, creativity. Spontaneity, openness and an observant eye seem to be good substitutes.

What makes art valuable ?

How do we value art? Each of us has a different scale of values and different definitions of art. But there are enough instances when everyone agrees on art being of great value and part of our cultural heritage. I was reminded of this when I heard a discussion on the BBC programme, Outlook, this week, during which there was an interview with Cori Wegener, Associate Curator of Decorative Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She was talking of the efforts to save artworks made almost immediately after the earthquake struck Haiti in January. Heroic efforts were made to rescue and protect the rich and diverse cultural heritage there and they have continued ever since to try and ensure there will be artwork for future generations of Haiti.

Part school, part gallery, this Centre existed for artists  for 66 years. Here ,in 1945, Andre Breton had praised a painting's authenticity and thus put Haiti on the art-collectors' map. (Image courtesy of Alison Wright, Smithsonian.com)

What impels people to risk their own lives and well being to go in and rescue artworks? It is almost visceral, I suspect, for those who have a respect and love for things of beauty, which are testimony to man's - and woman's - skill, passion, culture, need to create... The list of heroic actions to save artworks of all descriptions is long. When there was the huge fire at Windsor Castle in 1992, the works of art - Master drawings, paintings, manuscripts and books - and furniture, carpets, miniatures and other valuables were rescued. Another time when Cori Wegener became involved directly was after the Baghdad Museum was looted during the Iraqi invasion. Then an Army Reservist, she was sent to help assess the damage at the Museum and help restore the situation. Floods in Florence, Prague or Venice all evoke huge efforts to save art in past years, while an earthquake situation, in Aquila, Italy last year caused enormous distress at the lost of art and architecture.

The list goes on and on, but implicit in all the stories reported in the press is the message: people do care - very much - about art of all descriptions. They consider it important enough to save, even at risk of their own well being. Indeed, there is the Blue Shield organisation, which was set up to protect the world's cultural heritage by coordinating preparations to meet and respond to emergency situations, the cultural version of the Red Cross. Its existence is an interesting assessment of the value of art to mankind.

The Eye of the Art Collector

Thanks - once again! - to ArtDaily.org's listings, I happened on an up-coming Sotheby's sale of old Master Drawings from a private collection. I spent a fascinated hour on their site, going through the E-Catalogue of the drawings, some eighty of them, the ideal occupation for a dark, rainy day.

It is always extremely interesting to view a collection of art formed by one person, particularly a person who has a trained eye and knowledge of the media involved. I quote from the news release about this collector (who apparently spent about 25 years assembling this collection). "In his very personal forward to the sale catalogue, the collector who assembled this remarkable group of drawings wrote that he embarked on collecting “with the bold aim of looking over the artist’s shoulder”. There can be no question that he succeeded in this aim. The light that these extremely varied studies shed on the artistic creative process is both intense and wide ranging: we see every moment in the artist’s thought process revealed and illuminated."

There is a remarkable energy and life evident in the drawings this collector assembled. The artists are clearly in the throes of excitement and creativity. Famous names or not, it does not matter. The hallmarks of these drawings are immediacy, directness, sureness of touch and stroke. The collector does indeed describe well what he sought - and found - when he selected these works. Different media, different subject matter, some clearly well thought-out and planned, others on the spur of the moment, catching images almost on the fly... Some as aide-mémoires, others as exploration. In short, the collection came across to me as a most interesting selection of artists' emotions, desires, endeavours, aims... running a gamut of approaches and techniques. Little interesting items too, such as remarks about an exquisite study of a seated woman by Jean-Antoine Watteau. "It was executed in a combination of media that Watteau used only occasionally, but to striking effect: the majority of the figure is built up with a network of silvery strokes of graphite (a very rare medium in Old Master Drawings), (my emphasis) while the accents in the face and hands are in a more typical red chalk, an extremely effective juxtaposition that creates a lively yet utterly elegant figure."

When you go back and try to find out about the use of graphite before the early 18th century, it is indeed hard, as a neophyte, to find allusions to many graphite drawings. Pure graphite, first mined in Borrowdale, England, in the 1500s, seems initially to have been used for under drawing in the 16th century. It was more forgiving than metalpoint, especially silverpoint, the draughtsman's favoured medium during Renaissance times in spite of silverpoint's linear qualities and permanence of mark. Graphite does not seem to have been used much for drawing until well into the 17th century. Artists tended to favour chalks, red and black, as well as charcoal for studies and finished drawings alike. (Interestingly, the Venetian artists continued to favour black chalk, whilst the perhaps more flamboyant Florentine and Roman artists preferred the harder red chalk with which they could show off their skills!) Graphite became widespread only in the 18th century, with the increasing difficulty of obtaining good-quality natural chalks and the simultaneous production of a fine range of graphite pencils after the invention of a graphite pencil in Nuremberg in 1662.

Graphite drawings then become far more widespread: John Constable, Jongkind and later John Singer Sargent, for example, all used graphite in their work, particularly when working plein air.

Self-Portrait, 1806, John Constable, (Image courtesy of the Tate, London)

Ingres was famed for his use of hard graphite pencils when drawing his wonderful detailed portraits of people.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867). Study for "Raphael and the Fornarina" (detail), ca. 1814. Graphite on white wove paper, 10 x 7 3/4 in. (25.4 x 19.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975

By the turn of the 19th century, Cezanne and so many others commonly used pencils, as have we all done since in the art world - often to great effect.

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Hortense Fiquet (Madame Cézanne) Sewing, ,c. 1880, Graphite
Samuel Courtauld Trust: Princes Gate Bequest, 1978

But back to the Sotheby E-Catalogue of the drawings that occasioned my little foray into the rarity of Old Master graphite drawings... (and by the way, the definition of Old Masters in Western art is work executed before 1800...), it is well worth going through this collection of images of drawings. It allows one to remember how interesting it can be when one sees an art collection formed by one person with the courage of his or her own convictions and erudition.

The Elegance of Imperfection

Back in May when I was in Spain, I read with interest a long article in El Pais by Antonio Muñoz Molina on the artist Vija Celmins' exhibition then showing at New York's McKee Gallery. The descriptions told of how Celmins works, in her studio, in quiet solitude, communing with objects that she has brought into the studio from walks on the beach or Western deserts, from sidewalk or garage sales in New York or where ever. Her close inspection of the objects then is translated into minutely detailed, intimate paintings and drawings of surfaces, interiors, textures, patterns. Their abstraction and depth, both in tactile effect and message, seem to reach far beyond the mere frames. But always, these images apparently allow for imperfection, as it is first in nature and real life, but more so as she creates her art. The overall effect is powerful and compelling.

Vija Celmins , Web # 1,  Charcoal on paper, Image courtesy of Tate / National Galleries of Scotland

Sky, 1975, Vija Celmins, Lithograph on paper, (Image courtesy of the Tate, London)

Her work is very well considered, with awards and exhibitions in major institutions in this country. What interested me was the way she apparently deals with blacks - in paint but especially with graphite. When drawing with graphite, with all its permutations of hardness in the grades of Hs and soft Bs, a lot of skill is need to go on getting a more and more intense black. Unless you are careful, as with pastels, the paper surface gets to such a point of "saturation" that no more graphite will adhere.

What is always fun, when looking at other people's art or reading about it, is to have a sudden idea about something interesting and new to try in one's own art. Thinking about Celmins' work brought back to mind a wonderful goldpoint/platinumpoint drawing I saw in the Telfair Museum of Art metalpoint exhibition, The Luster of Silver, in which I was involved in 2006. Dennis Martin, now sadly deceased, had done the most sensitive and beautiful portrait of his wife. He then surrounded this delicate, almost ethereal three-quarters-size portrait with deep, dark, lustrous graphite. The contrast with the goldpoint drawing was dramatic and most effective.

All these thoughts about artists' skills with graphite are tempting me. Now if the temperatures outside would just diminish a little, I could go off and start doing some drawing plein air!

The Tree Museum

When I first read of the announced opening of the Tree Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, in Art + Auction, I was intrigued with the concept. Now that the Museum is actually open, it sounds more than enchanting. As an artist who adores trees and is for ever drawing them, a Tree Museum seems the ultimate in logic and totally civilized.

Th Tree Museum, Zurich

Enzo Enea, a Swiss landscape garden architect, has been saving venerable, important trees for the past seventeen years, often using bonsai techniques to ensure their safe transplantation and survival. His considerable collection of trees indigenous to the region are now displayed in the Museum, often with enclosures to enhance their presentation but also to ensure the micro climate they require. Peace and contemplation are words used about the displays. They also evoke, I am sure, a sense of time spans that are different, and differently-paced, to our human rhythms of life. I know that when I look at the massive live oaks growing along the Georgia coast, I feel humbled by their majestic span of time and space. Trees allow one to become more centered, more in tune with the natural world, more aware of the need to be good stewards of the environment.

The Tree Museum

The Tree Museum

The Tree Museum

For artists who love drawing and painting trees, this Tree Museum will be of great interest. Nonetheless, we don't have to go to museums to marvel at trees; just look around you, where ever you are, and there will probably be a tree that can stop you in your tracks. Depicting it on paper or canvas can be a fascinating exercise in observation. It also allows one better to appreciate the amazing "engineering" of a tree that permits it to grow and stretch and flourish in beauty.

Clearly Enzo Enea has a deep understanding and love of trees. His collection of more than two thousand specimens in his Tree Museum will be a wonderful place to visit.

(The images have been downloaded from the Tree Museum website, with my thanks.)

Climate Control for Artwork

The other day, the Indianapolis Museum of Art announced that it was allowing greater fluctuations in the temperature and humidity ranges in most of the museum galleries and storage spaces. The goal is to save energy and thereby reduce carbon emissions, a key initiative the Museum has apparently embraced for the last five years, according to the ArtDaily.org article.

Recent research has shown that there can safely be as much as 15% fluctuation in relative humidity and variations of as much as ten degrees Celsius in temperature in all but a few galleries (those where composite artwork is displayed or stored, such as Asian screens and scrolls). Conservation Analytical Laboratory researchers concluded that there is no need to be so meticulous over climate control as museums have been: "materials such as wood, cellulose, various polymer coating, fibers, minerals, pigments and the like share an overlapping range of tolerance to temperature and relative humidity. "It is thus far more energy efficient to allow more variations in temperature and relative humidity in museum facilities, according to the time of day, during a 24 hour cycle. According to the new standards set out by the IMA," with incremental seasonal adjustments, the range for humidity will be 50% RH +/- 8 (with a variation percentage of +/- 6% in a 24 hour period) and for temperature will be 70°F +/- 4 (with a variation percentage of +/- 2° in a 24 hour period."

What does all this mean for the general public, with artwork and other important objects in our homes or even in many galleries? I take it to mean that art in general, particularly work done on paper, for example, is more adaptable that most people believed to normal climatic conditions. Obviously, living in tropical or sub-tropical areas is extremely taxing on art and artifacts. Nonetheless, in a home which is air-conditioned and at temperatures comfortable to its human inhabitants, most work can survive reasonably - if, and a big if, it is treated archivally in the first place.

Works on paper need to be matted, if necessary, with acid-free museum mat-board, mounted archivally and properly protected in suitable frames. Hanging art work on outside walls, if they are not very well insulated, is hazardous, even with air-conditioning, and bright sunlight is another danger.

It seems to be that every one of us can be moderate and sensible about climate control in the stewardship of art. We can thus, even incrementally, help in the reduction of energy consumption. The Gulf debacle lends this endeavour even more relevance.

Making Art

I came across an interesting quote today: Sol Lewitt was talking of the "primacy of idea in making art". His thesis was the idea itself, even if it is not eventually made visual, is as much a finished work of art as any finished product. This is as succinct a statement as one could wish about Conceptual art.

Lewitt continued, "All intervening steps, scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed works, models, studies, thoughts, conversations are of interest." Thus the idea, the intention, the gestures, are all almost part of a choreography of creation, of making art.

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 565, June 1988 (Image courtesy of SFMOMA)

Whilst I know that some art-making is indeed a process of this type, with ideas that might or might end up as visual art, I find that there are other ways that art gets made. For instance, I know that when I am working plein air amidst wonderful scenery, I very soon find that after the initial spark of excitement and assessment of the viability of composition, what medium to use, and other technical considerations, I am no longer "thinking" at all. I am just some sort of channel for my eyes and my hand to work together to produce art. The process is in essence pure reaction, beyond having any idea per se. However, it does also mean that one needs to have a lot of practice, of trial and error, in order to make decent art, because instinct is not always a good guide to art-making!

Dedication and hard work are needed, in fact, whether one's avenue is conceptual or not. Making art is fascinating, complex, many faceted and endlessly stimulating. Sol Lewitt was an eloquent ambassador for art-making.

Artistic influences, conscious or unconscious

It is always fun to see an image and then link it back to another artist and deduce an influence or heritage, conscious or unwitting. Today, on Art Knowledge News, that wonderful daily Web magazine, there was the announcement of an exhibition opening at the Boise Art Museum. The accompanying image, a reproduction of a detail of Virginia Partridge, is a marvel of accuracy, composition, rhythm and energy. It was painted in 1825 but printed in 1829.

Detail from Plate 76 of John James Audubon's Birds of America. Virginian Partridge (Northern Bobwhite) under attack by a young red-shouldered hawk. Restored by RestoredPrints.com 2008.

As I delighted in the image, I suddenly realised that I had seen the same sort of fidelity to nature, allied with a wonderful rhythmic energy and sense of colour in another artist's work.

Walter Anderson , a remarkable artist who was born in 1903 in New Orleans, spent many years recording the natural world in the Gulf of Mexico - work made even more poignant given the current oil spill disaster unfolding in the same areas. He spent a great time of time alone, after 1947, on Horn Island, one of the Mississippi Gulf Coast barrier islands. His watercolours of turtles, fishes, birds of every description, trees and water are marvels of luminosity and freedom. I had hoped to be able to illustrate this entry with one of the images which I find so evocative of Audubon's bobwhite illustrated above, but alas, the copyright situation with the Walter Anderson Museum precludes it. Nonetheless, the painting of red wing blackbirds is well worth the link-click to see it. There is a good selection of his work on the Google images for Walter Anderson- his sense of composition comes through clearly.

Redwing Blackbirds, Walter Anderson (Image courtesy of Walter Anderson Museum of Art

Anderson was given an art education at the precursor to the Parsons School of Design and then the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before spending time in Europe. There he claimed to be more influenced by the caves and cathedrals than the museums' contents. Nonetheless, as I look at Audubon's wonderful studies of America's birds, I can't help feeling that, wittingly or unwittingly, Walter Inglis Anderson was greatly indebted to him. Just as we all are, as artists, down the chain of years when we learn of how other artists react to the world around us. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Those who love drawings

Back on 3st May, I wrote about how I felt sad for people who simply by-passed a drawing on a wall in favour of a painting and thus missed the intimate and fascinating dialogue that is possible with such works.

Very soon afterwards, I read Souren Melikian's article, "An Inspiring Case of Schizophrenia" in the June issue of Art + Auction. I should first say that over the years of reading this magazine, I have become a huge admirer of Mr. Melikian and his deep, encyclopedic knowledge of so many branches of art and antiques, from his main love, 16th century Persian literature and Iranian art, to old master paintings and drawings. This particular article, sub-titled "Paintings and drawings belong to different worlds. So do the collectors who seek them out", dealt essentially with the same attitudes towards drawings as I had been writing about earlier. Souren Melikian was writing about the March Salon du Dessin, in Paris, where an atmosphere of rapt, close attention is the norm on the gallery stands, totally different from the "bustle and boom" of other art fairs. He went on to describe some of the interesting and beautiful drawings to be seen, some of which had been discovered to be studies for later paintings after considerable connoisseurship and sleuthing.

"Great works on paper do not lend themselves to hype, nor can they be summed up in the sound bites that are so dear to the media and auction houses alike." Not only that, Melikian continued, they do not command the same prices, especially if the drawings cannot be linked to a painting. As most artists know, drawings are private works, often done to express thoughts and feelings without regard to the public arena. Often too, mediocre painters can produce dazzlingly wonderful drawings, even though the market place has difficulty in accepting such works. It takes someone who loves drawings for themselves and has developed a deep knowledge of them to appreciate such buying opportunities.

An interesting point made about drawings historically by Melikian is that they often herald, by many decades or even centuries, new artistic trends in painting. One example he cites is of 16th century drawings by the Genoan artist, Luca Cambiaso, who reduced human figures to simple geometrical figures in a way that could - or should - have led to a Cubist movement in Italy in the 1500s.

The Visitation, c. 1580,
pen & brown ink brown wash on paper, Luca Cambiaso (Image courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia)

Other artists he referred to include Victor Hugo, who was a pioneer in abstract art in the 1850 and 1860s with his amazingly atmospheric black ink drawings, many done while he sought political asylum from Napoleon's Second Empire in Jersey and later Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Another artist who could already be termed an Abstract Expressionist in his drawings of 1855 was the Spanish artist, Eugenio Lucas Velazquez, who signed himself Eugenio Lucas. A minor painter, his arresting drawings in black ink or pencil could easily be read as abstract works, a century ahead of his peers.

Eugenio Lucas, Madrid 1817–1870 Madrid,Priest Declaiming, ca. 1850, Black chalk and brown wash (Image courtesy of the Morgan Library, New York)

As Souren Melikian underlined, it takes faith in one's own eye and a knowledge of drawings, old or contemporary, to allow one to enter this quiet and rewarding world that runs parallel to that of paintings. When one does, the delights, surprises and rewards do not fail.

More on "Artists' Eyes on the Skies"

I heard a fascinating addendum to my blog entry of June 7th about artwork helping to unravel meteorologist mysteries of the past on NPR today. With the title, "Scientists pinpoint Monet's Balcony", host Guy Raz interviewed John Thornes, Professor of Applied Meteorology at Birmingham University.

Like other scientists looking at artists' work to learn of past weather conditions and other situations, John Thornes has been studying Claude Monet's paintings which he did in London in the winters of 1899-1901. These famous paintings of Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridges and along the Thames to the Houses of Parliament - 95 images in total - were painted from the balcony of his rooms at the Savoy Hotel. As Monet did so often, he worked on different canvases as the light moved. He apparently used the morning light to depict Waterloo Bridge, the midday hours to paint the Charing Cross Bridge and ended his busy days capturing the sunsets along the river towards the Houses of Parliament.

Impression, Sunrise,  1872, oil on canvas, Claude Monet, (Image courtesy of the Musee Marmottan)

Professor Thornes and his team used solar geometry and historical weather data to determine exactly which balconies of the Savoy had become Monet's painting sites, based on the sunlight that Monet painted in each canvas. Monet, like many other artists, was amazingly accurate in his representation of the prevailing weather, so the visual coloured record of wintertime London is also one of the famous "pea souper" conditions that prevailed for so long in the smoky, foggy city. Monet, in fact, damaged his health by exposure to all that pollution, even though he apparently considered all the smog as an "envelope" between him and the scenery.

Clearly scientists have a rich resource to mine in artists' observations of the skies and world around them. For John Thornes, for example, the next of Monet's paintings to be examined for meteorological information is his Impression, Sunrise, the canvas painted at Le Havre that purportedly gave rise to the name of Impressionism. It must be a thrill to combine one's passions for art and science in these sleuthing ventures.