Creating Art: Staring until your Eyes Pop

Vincent Van Gogh,Self-Portrait, 1889, Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

Author Simon Schamaused this wonderful phrase about Vincent Van Gogh, in his book, "The Power of Art".Schama talked of Van Gogh seeking to create art that was imbued with the "visionary radiance" that previous generations of artists had found in Christianity.  To achieve this source of light and inspiration that could reach out to fellow men, Van Gogh's approach was painting with "blood and blisters and staring until your eyes popped" (my emphasis).

Even though Van Gogh did not necessarily follow the time-honoured rules of perspective, colour usage or subject-matter, he sought to give his art a different, more open view of life that embraced nature in all its aspects.  His pulsating interpretations of trees, fields, and flowers show powers of observation that amaze. Catching the clouds, the light, the motion of the wheat, or, in the Olive Grove below, the silvery dance and form of the olive trees - all that requires great, tenacious powers, first of observation, then of organisation and simplification.

Wheat Field with Cypresses, Van Gogh, 1889, Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Olive Grove, Van Gogh, 1889

Every artist, especially those working with aspects of the world around him or her, knows that observation is key to understanding and thus depicting a subject.  It does not necessarily have to  be a realistic depiction either, just as in Van Gogh's case.  Nonetheless, staring and staring at your subject always brings rewards; you keep noticing fresh aspects, you learn how things interlock, how things work, where the light falls, how shadows shape things. In this month's Artist's Magazine,for instance, in an article on still life artist Eric Wert, he is quoted as spending long hours "trying to get to the reality of a particular element.  'But once all the data are there that makes something look real,' he says, ' I step back and let it become its own creature, develop its own personality.  I'm open to what the subject can start to tell me.' "

Another time one needs to stare, stare and stare some more is during life drawing.  As soon as an artist begins to draw from a live model, the conversation begins between eyes, hand and the model. The subtleties of light on skin, the delicacy of muscles in tension or at rest, the twist of limbs or torso only reinforce the need to look and understand.  Only with that understanding comes the freedom then to simplify, edit and create works that are powerful.  Take but one example - Rembrandt:

Constantijn Daniel van Renesse,, Rembrandt and his Pupils drawing from a Nude Model. c. 1650, Image courtesy of Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt

Rembrandt, Study of Female Nude seen from the Back, 1630-34, Image courtesy of the Courtauld Institute, London

In other words, as the old English saying goes - "Open your peepers"! Your art will thank you.

Art and Cooking

A story in today's NPR All Things Considered about cooking a Tuna Noodle Casserole started with a statement that immediately had me making a parallel with art.  Melissa Gray was citing food editor and author Ellen Brown discussing her recipe for this dish.  She started by quoting Ellen Brown saying that many food professionals claim that we eat with our eyes first. Brown however disputes this claim and thinks that it is not with our senses that we approach food, but with our emotions.

I think that the same order of priorities often comes to play when we approach art.  Long before we start looking at paintings or drawings, for instance, we are in a mood and frame of mind to look at art. In many cases, we make a conscious decision to go to an art museum or an art gallery. So we have already elected to go in a frame of mind that is open to viewing art, for reasons that range from experiencing beauty to learning about an artist's work, or, on occasions, to purchasing a work of art. Of course, there are other times when we round a corner, or just happen on, a work of art that stops us in our tracks.  But bound up with the visual experience always comes a rush of emotion - interest, delight, surprise, incomprehension – a full gamut of reactions or emotions is possible.

Only after that first visceral reaction do we start to use our eyes to study the work of art and understand more about it.  Perhaps then the same effect can happen as occurs when we have a plate of attractively presented food placed in front of us.  Colour, shape, texture, form – all count at that point.

But I think Ellen Brown has a point: just as we associate a certain dish that we know with pleasant past experiences (or the reverse!), so we associate certain artists' works with previously experienced emotions positive or negative.  For most people, "Claude Monet" means beautiful Impressionist landscapes that radiate luminosity and delight the viewer. 

The Manneporte (Etretat), Claude Monet, oil on canvas, image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Antibes vue de la Salis, Claude Monet, 1888, image courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

The name, "Titian", conveys to many viewers a sense of marvel and admiration at extraordinary portraits, long before one's eyes can feast on the skill and virtuosity with which he depicts his subjects. 

Portrait of an Old Man (Pietro Cardinal Bembo), Titian, 1546 ,Image courtesy of  Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest)

"Rodin" means wondrous, sensuous, powerful shapes sculpted in plaster, marble or bronze; it is only later that our eyes can tell us exactly how and why we find his work so memorable.

Eternal Springtime, Auguste Rodin, 1880-1901, image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Emotions and/or senses – basically Ellen Brown is talking about the same important ingredients of life as we all are - enhancing and celebrating life through beauty, interest, taste. Both cooking and art help us get though each day with  enjoyment.

Positive Aspects of Art

I was reading an interview done with designer Rachel Roy, about her collections and designing clothes.  She was visiting Valencia at the time, and was featured in Diario de Mallorca.

One of her remarks rang so true, for any artist.  She said, "The positive thing about art is that you need to know how to tell your own story, always respecting what you are doing and as well, what others are doing."

I thought it was so simple an observation and so accurate.  It goes back to the issue of one's own personal style as a visual artist, how to achieve it by being true unto oneself, and yet being aware of what one is doing, or trying to do, at the same time as keeping one's eyes open to the world, and art in particular, around one. She went on to say in essence that one should also be fair to oneself, and basically not worry about criticism too much.

Certainly, if one is working seriously and thoughtfully, keeping one's focus on what matters personally and what one is trying to say in the art - or letting the art say things for one - then that is telling your own story. As Picasso remarked, "Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."  I think that the "diary entries" and our stories become universal many times without one realising it, and they thus resonate with others, often in ways that the artist cannot foresee.  

Pablo Picasso

In these times of angst, it is interesting to see how many voices are raised about the importance of art - of all kinds - that helps engender curiosity and expansion of the human spirit.  Since each of us is an individual, with individual experiences, those personal stories enrich everyone's life and widen each person's optic on the world around us.

Rachel Roy gave a timely reminder of how positive art can be for us all.

"Crossed Gazes"

Obra Social "La Caixa", the cultural foundationbelonging to the Spanish bank, La Caixa, offers wonderful, often thought-provoking art exhibitions in its different venues throughout Spain.  In CaixaForum Palma, in the Balearic Islands, there is an interesting exhibition currently on display, "Crossed Gazes".

It is a selection of works owned by La Caixa Foundation and the MACBA Foundation from Barcelona. Realistic art from the 1950s and 60s is juxtaposed with abstract work from the 1980s and 90s. Theshow uses paintings, some sculpture and photographs to examine how artists saw the world during those decades and how they chose to express what they felt about their realities. There are works by artists as varied as Sigmund Polke and Anselm Kiefer, Joan Miro, Henri Michaux, Antoni Tapies or Philip Guston, Jean Dubuffet or Edouardo Chillida.Many photographs were included, often black and white (Brassai, Robert Frank or Xavier Miserachs for the earlier decades) and in colour, usually of huge format for the later decades (Andreas Gursky, Hiroshi Sugimoto or Thomas Struth amongst others).

I personally found the title of the exhibition a little ironic, as my reactions to the art, as I walked through the rooms, were those of someone with a personal set of "crossed gazes".  It so happened that the previous day, I had spent a magical day by myself in the countryside, working plein air, drawing and marvelling at the complex, expansive beauty of the countryside and the amazing abstractions within the natural world around me.  Abstractions of form in trees and their bark, the lay of the land, types of stones and their patterns – things which I found fascinating to observe.

Consequently, when I walked into the CaixaForum exhibition the following day and began to look hard at the works of art on display, I found myself getting almost claustrophobic.  The massive paintings of the  80s and 90s, the Kiefer, the Miquel Barcelo or the one by Juan Usle, bore down on me in a way I had not expected - they seemed airless and pretentious.  This surprised me as I usually find that particularly Barcelo's and Anselm Kiefer's work interest and often move me.  My reaction made me realise afresh that large paintings are not my favourite format - I relate far more comfortably to work of "human" size, works that are more intimate and draw one in to a closer look.  I think that we have been, and still are, living in an era when public spaces have required huge works of art, and somehow the intensity of such work is diluted and lost. My personal gaze finds that art on a smaller scale is often a far greater test of quality and veracity - bombast can cover a lot of sins, verbally or in art.

My disappointment - at myself especially - continued when I went on to the rooms covering the 50s and 60s.  There, the art was indeed of a more human scale, often quite small in size.  The photographs were full of impact, and also of historic interest, of course.  Nonetheless, the abstract art seemed a little disassociated from anything that I could relate to today; gone - thankfully - is the angst that the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War generated in artists who were striving to distance themselves from those particular awful realities.  There was, nonetheless, a feeling of almost desperate creativity in the work that seemed almost forced, a "we have got to do something totally different from anything done before" feeling.  In a way, that is always a sub-text of each decade in the art world - we all strive to be different and innovative.  However, the overall effect of my "crossed gazes" was somewhat depressing in that all these talented artists' works were just not "talking to me" that day!  

Philip Guston, Untitled (1968). and Tower (1968)

Philip Guston,

Yet there were truths in some of the work that resonate constantly.  One commentary, of three 1967 ink on paper drawings by Philip Guston - Mark, Edge and Horizon, interested me. They were very minimalist lines on paper, like the ones illustrated above, to some extent. However, the curator's commentary for them ran as follows (in Spanish and a mixture with my English translation):

La materia misma de la pintura - su pigmento y su espacio - se resiste mucho a la voluntad, se siente muy poco inclinado a reafirmar su plano y permanecer inmovil.  La pintura parece una imposibilidad, solamente con un signo de su propria luz de vez en cuando.  Lo cual seguramente se debe al estrecho pasaje entre el diagramar y ese otro estado, la corporeidad.  En este sentido, pintar es poseer, mas que imaginar.

The very essence of painting - its pigment and space - is so resistant to the will, so inclined to assert its plane and remain still.  Painting seems an impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.  Which must be because of the short passage from being a diagram to that other state - taking physical shape. In this sense, to paint is to possess rather than to imagine. 

Concepts to ponder as I sort out my gaze from the "Crossed Gazes" of the exhibition.  Perhaps it means a return visit to the CaixaForum!

Individual Voices in Art

Every time an artist has to interact with a gallery owner, a competition judge, a collector or the public, there are some implicit questions lurking at the back of the artist's mind:  is my art individual enough, does it stand out as different from the art created by others, will it retain my hallmark and stamp?

Every choice made in creating a work of art carries those implications and questions, even if we don't consciously think about them as we work.  Willy-nilly, the work of art will reflect who the artist is, even in commissioned work. Works of art are about things, people and places seen and remembered, with the resultant interpretation of what the eyes have observed, and the brain imagined, thought about and interpreted.  Thus each artist, as an individual, can develop that unique voice.  As Yeoh Guan Yong, of Shanghai's Super Nature Design, said, "Art is about finding individual voices and searching one's own heart and soul."

To do this requires an artist to be lucid about him or herself, honest and observant, in fact.  That little inner voice needs to be respected, and the ability to do this only comes with experience and active effort.  I was thinking about this development that every artist has to achieve as I was reading a wonderful new biography about Titian, Titian: His Lifeby Sheila Hale.  She brings out the fact that this quiet, elegantly behaved artist was observant and dedicated in his art, adapting examples from other artists to enrich and improve his own art, yet remaining very much in his own idiom as he developed into the great artist that he became.

Man with a Glove.  Image courtesy of Musee du Louvre, Paris

Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo (?), Image courtesy of  The National Gallery, London. Bought, 1904 © The National Gallery, London

Titian's portraits, as in the examples above,with their powerful simplicity and psychological penetration, also demonstrate the other maxim that we all need to remember, as practising artists: "Simple is not always best, but the best is always simple." Only when we refine and refine our art to be true unto ourselves can we hope to achieve a voice that others can recognise as ours and ours alone.  That is a lifetime occupation!

Cutting Funds for the Arts

Government and other bodies turn to cutting funds for the arts again and again. It is an almost monotonous - but oh so sad - "official announcement".  I was reminded forcibly of this as I read headlines this week in the Spanish press about more cuts in the arts budgets, and at the same time, that Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, is considering closing its Visual Arts Department.  Just two small examples of this continual drumbeat of cuts to lessen any country's chances of a cultured, civilised society within its borders and beyond.

The powers that be find it easy to forget that the arts get people involved in science, mathematics, geometry, history, language, social sciences in general, and on and on. You find this out in spite of yourself any time you engage in art-making or art viewing, whether you conscientiously realise it or not.  Everyone in power mouths platitudes about wanting their country's inhabitants to be better educated, to be able better to face a far more complicated future in the ever-expanding global marketplace.  Yet the optics on how better to ensure a suitable education to achieve well-rounded, versatile and competent human beings seem to become narrower and more impoverished in so many instances.  The image below, courtesy of the Guardian newpaper in the UK, says it well.

Artists Mark Wallinger, left, David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller, right, lobby cent cuts in arts funding, in London, September 2010. Photograph: Alastair Grant / AP

I could not help thinking about how I would cope in life if I had not had the good fortune to be introduced, as eary as possible, to the arts.  In East Africa, museums, concert halls, and art galleries were virtually non-existent when I was growing up, but that did not prevent my being taken to the wonderful top art and natural history museums when I first went to Europe at the age of five, as well as to ballet performances, concerts.  Soon afterwards, theatre-going was also introduced, while my reading included wonderful illustrated books, full of beauty. Had I not started out in this way, I would now find daily life far more limited, more complicated.  Just a small example: in the process of redoing a bathroom, the multiple choices one has to make of tiles, faucets, styles of hand basin, finish of towel rails, etc., would be so much harder had I not been allowed to develop an innate sense of style and design.  My own style and design, of course, for each of us is an individual: nonetheless, an ensemble which ultimately produces an effect, a statement, a type of bathroom. The interesting thing is that other people then also can relate to those choices made, because, when said and done, there is an underlying tissue of culture uniting us, a tissue that can be fostered and improved when people can have access to examples of the different arts.

Just to carry my example a little further about the bathroom:  if people have been given a decent grounding in the arts during their education, they then have far more confidence in themselves when it comes to making esthetic choices.  When decorating their home, for instance, it would not be so necessary to call on the services of interior decorators (not that I have anything against interior decorators for they perform valuable services), simply to feel comfortable about the choices they are making.

Ultimately, having access to education about and exposure to the arts in general empowers people.  At a time when individuals need all the tools and knowlege we can muster to push back against abusive power structures, it seems almost machaevellian to cut funding for the arts.

"Nothing Ugly in Art"

Auguste Rodin asserted that "There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth." (Remember that the very first sculpture he submitted to the Paris Salon was The Man with the Broken Nose, a sculpture that was the essence of what people normally considered ugliness, not only in the subject it portrayed, but also in the way the sculpture was executed, with an emphasis on the emotion of the piece and its rough, unfinished nature.)

Rodin, Man with a Broken Nose

Yet Rodin was, in effect, setting out on a course of teaching his viewers about a new vocabulary of art, a one that was more relevant to the time in which he lived, one that was truthful and more meaningful to his age. Perhaps every artist does the same thing, consciously or unconsciously. The miracle is that viewers, down the ages, seem to learn from artists how to enter into a dialogue, refocus their eyes and learn to adjust to what seemed ugly, jarring or strange before. That readjustment on the part of viewers represents the ever-renewing pact between artist and viewer.

I have just had my wonderful website wizard, Tracie of Traceable Creations, refresh the images on my website, http://www.jeanninecook.com, and I was reminded of what Rodin said about nothing in art being ugly as I looked at the Drawings page. 

Without realising it, I seem to be depicting more and more trees, tree bark, strange tree formations. All things which even I, years ago, might have hesitated to describe as beautiful. Now, however, I find them compelling, complex and highly eloquent – eloquent about the life those trees have led, the storms they have weathered, the droughts they have endured. They have become, for me, metaphors for a lot of what is happening to people all around, whose lives that have become even more complex and taxing than ever.

The inner truths about all these trees I find so fascinating are there to read if we want. They adapt, they endure, they grow in grace.  The scars of their lives add to their interest and individuality, their growth is logical yet idiosyncratic. Even in death, they are amazing.

Just like Rodin's Man with the Broken Nose, the trees all around us can be totally memorable. It makes me feel even more acutely that we need to be good stewards of all aspects of nature. Our daily lives can be so much more magical if we remember that there is nothing really ugly in nature, nor in art. It just depends on the focus of our mental and physical eyes.

"Cannibalising" the World

Joan Miro famously once remarked that "That magical spark is the only thing that matters in art".  In other words, he noticed and absorbed everything imaginable around him in his life, cannibalised it and transformed it into art, especially in his sculptures.  The most amazing things became part of his art, from his children's toys to the famous paper bag which caused one of his foundries to exclaim, "You expect us to cast a paper bag?"  The answer was yes, in bronze!

Miro - sculpture, image courtesy of Jeff Epler

To me, the lesson Miro gives us all is that as artists, we have to be open to every possible resource, every possible influence, because from it, and usually from the most unlikely of instances, comes the spark that leads to creation of something new in our art.

We all know about those moments when we pass something which is part of our daily life and which, until magic suddenly happens, has been unremarkable.  Then, unexpectedly, the light falls on the object in a certain way, or there is a new relevance to it because of something else going on in our head, whatever.  Then the "cannibalising" happens, and we can incorporate a new dimension into what we are creating.

Other times, the world becomes fresh and exciting because of a visit to somewhere new, which talks to one.  That little voice inside one's head says, "Pay attention, this is important", even though, at the time, you don't really know why.

This happened to me in Matera, South Italy, when I was looking at Neolithic shards of pottery in the Archaeological Museum.  They fascinated me, and I draw a lot of them, something I normally don't think of doing.  But as I drew them, I began to realise I was linking back to early artists who had, in their turn, looked around them in their world and cannibalised images from what they saw.  This was a link of many thousands of years, a fact which made an even greater impression on me.

Once home again, I realised that these notations that I had made were potentially the basis of a series of silverpoint drawings.  I was cannibalising on the world I had encountered in Matera, in essence.  This is one of the drawings.

Basilicata # 3 - silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

Thanks to those artists working aeons ago, I started doing work that is totally different from my normal drawings.  Sometimes it is definitely fun to be a "cannibal of the world".

More Thoughts on "White Page Fright"

Having blogged about the situation that all artists encounter, sooner or later, of having "white page/canvas fright" and being unable to get going on creating a piece of art, I discovered that the blog resonated with people. 

What I had not expected was to find that Eric R. Kandel, in his superb book, "The Age of Insight" (about which I have previously written), indirectly addressed this situation.  Discussing why unconscious thought, or distracted thought, helps creativity, Professor Kandel cites studies carried out by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch social psychologist, and his colleague Teun Meurs, which show that we all work best in terms of creativity when we don't consciously think about the problem.

Three groups of people were asked to perform various mental tasks, lists of activities or places, for instance. The people had to generate the lists immediately, after a few minutes of deliberately thinking about the lists or after a few minutes of being distracted by doing something else entirely.  Surprise, surprise – the groups all made the lists required, but the group that had produced the lists after being distracted, and thus being made "unconscious thinkers", made lists that were far more creative, interesting and full of differences.

So all those "strategies" of tidying up one's studio, taking the dog for a walk, ironing shirts, or whatever - are totally valid means of becoming creative. Artists have found all this for themselves, but it is interesting that carefully quantified studies validate all these strategems for becoming creative.  Professor Kandel details out the many insights into unconscious processes happening in the brain, and how it all works (pp.470-71).

As he states,  "distraction, letting the mind wander, may not only encourage unconscious (bottom-up) thought, but also, as evidenced by the emergence of a new solution, recruit a new top-down process from memory storage."  In other words, relax - the inspiration will come for that next work of art - when you least expect it.  But it will come - just trust that wonderful complex brain of yours!

More Thoughts on Art Residencies

I wrote about Art Residencies on 13th August, when I had just returned from a Residency in South Italy.  As life accelerates again, that experience is receeding a little into the past, although I am still creating art inspired by that visit.

Nonetheless, as I was reading the wonderful Eric R. Kandel book, The Age of Insight.  The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, I found a passage that seems to me to be really pertinent to art residencies. My thanks go to Professor Kandel for these insights and my using the quotes from his wonderful book.

Professor Kandel discusses the essential prerequisites for creativity - in other words, what an art residency seeks to offer.  The basic requirements are "technical competence and a willingness to work hard" (page 456), according to the famed Viennese art historian, Ernest Kris, and psychiatrist, Nancy Andreasen. Those criteria are givens, I suspect, in every selection an art residency makes of artists who will spend time at the residency. It would not make sense to have people coming if they could not perform competently as artists, unless, of course, they are coming for courses that are offered.

The other prerequisites that Professor Kandel cites are: "(1) the types of personalities that are likely to be particularly creative; (2) the period of preparation and incubation, when a person works on a problem consciously and unconsciously; (3)the initial moments of creativity themselves; and (4) subsequent working through of the creative idea."

The mixture of individuals who are knowledgeable in a discipline, the different cultures in which each individual works and the social field when the person comes all combine to form a creative mix.  That, to me, is a good summary of the interest and rewards of an art residency when the artists are all serious professionals, from different walks of life and coutnries, but all willing to share ideas and experiences.  This was the situation I experienced in South Italy, and it made the art residency there a delight, despite drawbacks on the administrative side of the residency.