"The True and the Essential" in Art

I am still mulling over the twists and turns of Vincent Van Gogh's life as an artist, with his highly intelligent reasonings or rationalisations about each phase of his art, especially in his letters to his brother, Theo.  So much to think about because, to a greater or lesser extent, most artists can learn a great deal from Van Gogh.

There is a wonderful quote of his in Van Gogh, A Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.  Writing in mid 1889, when he was staying at the Asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, at Saint-Rémy,  Van Gogh remarked, "In the open air, one works as best one can, one fills one's canvas regardless.  Yet that is how one captures the true and the essential - the most difficult part."

Iris, Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh, oil on canvas, 1889 (Image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

Even before Van Gogh was allowed to leave the asylum to paint further afield, he was "doing little things after nature", like these gem-like Iris.  Rather than thinking too much, he was going out to "look at a blade of grass, the branch of a fire tree, an ear of wheat, in order to calm down".  Painting as best he could, with spontaneity, and indeed, the essence of irises sings from the canvas. 

Landscape from Saint-Rémy, oil on canvas, Van Gogh, 1889 (Image courtesy of NY Carlsberg Glyptotek)

Olive Grove, oil on canvas, Van Gogh, 1889, (Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Netherlands)

Green Wheat Field with Cypress, oil on canvas, Van Gogh, 1889 (Image courtesy of Národiní Galerie, Prague)

These paintings show the progression of Van Gogh moving further out from the asylum, exploring the Midi landscapes, working en plein air, in heat and wind and sun, trying to capture this wide world in his new-found serenity of mind.

Mountains at Saint-Rémy, oil on canvas, Van Gogh, 1889, (Image courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY)

During this amazingly productive time, Van Gogh had found the clarity and peace that allowed him to cast away the fetters of mind and even those of drawing with the aid of his perspective frame.  He simply worked "by feeling and by instinct", in the same way, he decided, as the ancient Egyptians had done in their creative work.

I find it interesting that this was a brief time, for Van Gogh, when order, simplicity of living, and a cloistered serenity in the asylum all fostered his creativity.  He had the peace of mind and energy to go to the heart of what he was seeing and simply paint and draw.  

Time and time again, we get reminders of how solitude and peace help artists to find the "true and the essential" in their art.  Agatha Christie found inspiration and amazing productivity in her writing at her beloved home, Greenway, near Torquay, because of the quiet peacefulness there.  Author Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote a wonderful small book in 1957, A Time to Keep Silence, about his stay at the Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle, near Rouen in France.  He had gone there to write, but found that once he had become accustomed to the silence and deep orderliness of the life of the Benedictines monks, he was filled with an energy and creativity of "limpid freshness".

We all need that solitude and order in our lives to be able to reach whatever is true and essential to us as artists. Not always so easy in our world of today.  We need seriously to organise ourselves and find the discipline to turn off phones, unplug from the computer, make space and time and serenity. But there are rewards.

Gauguin versus Van Gogh - Their Art-Making Argument

When Paul Gauguin finally came south from Brittany to spend time with Vincent Van Gogh in the famous Yellow House in Arles in 1888, one of the many arguments that erupted between the two artists still has huge relevance for practically every artist today.

The argument boils down to the different approach to creating art. Should one work from real life, often plein air, as Van Gogh believed, or should one create art de tête, from one's head, by using prior drawings and painted studies, composed and executed in the studio, as Gauguin did?

Alychamps, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas, Private collection

Alyschamps,Arles, Paul Gauguin, 1888, oil on canvas, (Image courtesy of Musée d'Orsay)

These two paintings were among the initial salvos in this argument between the two artists.  Gauguin chose Les Alyschamps as a destination for painting, a place that Van Gogh had not talked of during his earlier seven months in Arles.  It had  been a necropolis since  Roman times, and over the centuries had evolved into a sacred burying ground, before having a railway track put through and the tombs destroyed.  By the 1880s, Arles' city government had transformed the debris into an allée with trees and gardens, a rendez vous for lovers and parading city dwellers.

As the days went past, Van Gogh and Gauguin continued to be more at odds than not, as is vividly detailed in the superb book,Van Gogh: A Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. As they write, "Vincent wanted to paint: Gauguin wanted to draw.  Vincent wanted to rush into the countryside at the first opportunity: Gauguin demanded a "period of incubation" - a month at least - to wander about, sketching and "learning the essence" of the place.  Vincent loved to paint en  plein air; Gauguin preferred to work indoors.  He saw their expeditions as fact-finding missions, opportunities to gather sketches - "documents" he called them - that he could synthesize into tableaux in the calm and reflection of the studio. Vincent championed spontaneity and serendipity; Gauguin constructed his images slowly and methodically, trying out forms and blocking in colours.  Vincent flung himself at the canvas headlong with a loaded brush and fierce intent: Gauguin built up his surfaces in tranquil sessions of careful brushstrokes." (pp.671-72).

The Night Café, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas (Image courtesy of the Yale University art Gallery, New Haven)

Night Café at Arles (Mme.Ginoux), Paul Gauguin, 1888, oil on canvas, (Image courtesy of Pushkin Museum, Moscow)

Earlier that year, Vincent Van Gogh had lugged his heavy easel into the all-night Café de la Gare in Arles, for three nights in a row, to paint its garish "clashes and contrasts", human and material.  Later, in the deadly psychological warfare that had broken out between Gauguin and Van Gogh, Gauguin drew a study of the wife of the Café's owner, Madame Ginoux.  Behind her in the painting he then did, he changed the viewpoint of Van Gogh's  café scene, inserting images cherished by Van Gogh, but he produced in essence a close evocation of Van Gogh's Café.  However, Gauguin created this imagined café scene in the studio, not in the Café de la Gare.

Pure imagination, arbitrary colour, invented compositions versus "surrendering myself to nature" as Van Gogh preferred to do, celebrating "the things that exist", as Vincent's brother, Theo, once observed; that remained the tussle between them.  There were many ramifications to this contrasting way of creating art, but part of Van Gogh's difficulty was often with the depiction of human figures.  He needed models in front of him to be able to grapple with the human form, and even then with difficulty.  He felt uncomfortable with the "more mysterious character" of the imagined scene.

During a rainy spell, Gauguin challenged Van Gogh to paint a scene from memory that Van Gogh ironically had described vividly to him a short time before.  He had told Gauguin how the vineyards at the base of Montmajour, past which they were walking, had looked a few weeks previously, during grape harvest.  He had told of the workers, the vivid colours and how these women had looked in the intense, autumnal sun. 

The Red Vineyard at Arles, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, oil, on canvas (Image courtesy of the Puskin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)

Grape Harvest at Arles, Paul Gauguin, 1888, oil on canvas, (image courtesy of the Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen)

Van Gogh used old drawings and relied on his knowledge of field workers.  By contrast, Gauguin reverted to the labourers of Brittany, not those of Provence, and with his enigmatic composition and depiction of the the two introverted figures, he raises more questions than gives answers.  His painting was a far cry from Van Gogh's more predictable, if a little awkward, painting of the grape harvest.

Van Gogh soon gave the de tête version of art another try.  He was triggered by family letters and waves of nostalgia to travel back mentally to his childhood home in Etten, Holland.  He imagines the two ladies he depicts might be his mother and his sister; he uses compositional tricks Gauguin used to wind through the canvas, leading the viewer to Midi cypress trees and the brilliantly hued gardens his mother used to cultivate.

Ladies of Arles (Memories of the Garden at Etten), Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas, 1888, (Image courtesy of the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg)

Old Women of Arles, Paul Gauguin, oil on canvas, 1888, (Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Once more, the two men created such different works - hardly surprising, however.  Again and again, as the days passed in The Yellow House,  the tensions flared between the two men. One painting in particular that Gauguin did of Van Gogh sums up his ability to go for the jugular... and how poisonous the atmosphere had become between the two protagonists.

Vincent Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, Paul Gauguin, oil on canvas, 1888, (Image courtesy of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

The rows and temporary amnesties eventually only ended when Gauguin left Arles and precipitated the famous ear-slicing episode that everyone remembers about Vincent Van Gogh. 

Yet those same issues - how to create art, no matter of what description, persist to this day.  Most of us oscillate between the two camps, sometimes working from real life, often en plein air.  At other times, imagined compositions, mosaics of different images placed together to create messages, images, ideas, predominate in our work.  The head versus the eye - every artist knows the argument.

Perhaps Van Gogh's remark in a letter to Theo sums up the situation we all know about: "In spite of himself and in spite of me, Gauguin has more or less proved to me that it is time I was varying my work a little."  In other words, be open to experimentation and change.

Van Gogh's Draughtsman's Fist

I am not sure that I made the best choice of reading material as I sat in hospital rooms with my husband for the past weeks, but nonetheless, I was glad to read the book.  Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have written a masterful biography, Van Gogh, The Life. Detailed, thoughtful and exhaustive, it brings to life every twist and eddy of Van Gogh's complex and tortured life.

I had never before thought deeply about how much mental illness and dysfunction there was in the entire Van Gogh family.  It was sobering to learn of it all and to measure just how amazing his creativity was, in spite of or despite all the incredible hurdles he faced in his short life.

For a start, given his astonishingly individualistic fashion of drawing towards the end of his life, masterpieces that are so readily recognisable, it is instructive to remember how much difficulty he had with draughtsmanship.  He worked and worked at drawing and tracing, redrawing and reworking, using his cumbersome perspective frame to deal with perspectives that otherwise daunted him completely.

Some of his early, painfully drawn works are worlds away from later work.

Diggers in Torn-up Street, The Hague, pencil, April 1882 (Image courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, The Netherlands)

Sorrow, April 1882, chalk on paper

This famous image of his mistress, Sien Hoornik, is one of a large number of versions of the drawing that he traced and retraced, working at its awkwardness, distilling its essence.

Head of a Peasant Woman Bareheaded, Nuenen, Dec-Jan 1884-85 (Image courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, The Netherlands)

Landscape with Willows and Sun shining through the Clouds,  Nuenen, mid March 1884, ink (Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Van Gogh always seemed to gravitate to the ugly and exaggerated in human types when he was working in the North, partly because he had great trouble in obtaining live models who would consent to pose for him.  He was far more comfortable with nature, which he knew intimately and loved all his life.

Writing to his brother Theo, he once said, "I really have a draughtsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to draw? I think you know quite well that I pushed on, and of course I gradually grew stronger in the battle." The later drawings bore out his statement - his mature drawings are amazing in their mark-making, organisation and frenetic energy.

Street in Saintes-Maries, June 1888, reed pen and ink on paper

The Zouave, June 1888, pen and ink

The rock of Montmajour with pine trees, 1888. (Image courtesy of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

Starry Night, June 1889, pen and ink (Image courtesy of the Museum of Architecture, Moscow)

Tree and bushes in the garden of the asylum, May-June,1889. (Image courtesy of Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) 

Olive Trees in a Mountain Landscape, June 1889, pen and ink

For any artist aspiring to draw in whatever fashion, Vincent Van Gogh is an example of sheer dogged persistence and courage. He teaches us all that we can evolve, refine our artistic voice, strengthen our skills and achieve a powerful, individualistic "draughtsman's fist" that allows others to relate to what we are trying to say.

Sharing One's Passion

Between spending my days in hospitals and hotels, there has been little time in the last six weeks to remember about my real passion in life, art.  Nonetheless, luck lent me a day of being able to talk about art-making, the joys and fascinations - and challenges - that come with it.

Aloe Exuberance, Palma., watercolour, Jeannine Cook artist

I felt a little like this watercolour painting that I had done in early January, which I entitled Aloe Exuberance.  The talk I was giving about art was at the end of my exhibition, Brush or Stylus: Jeannine Cook's Choices, at the spacious Albany Arts Council gallery in Albany, Georgia.  A roomful of ladies and one gentleman gathered at lunchtime: I soon learnt that most of them were watercolour artists, some art teachers, and most were also curious about metalpoint drawing.

It was really restorative to be talking about my passion for art and about how I approached art-making.  Each of us is very individualistic about this process of creation, but nonetheless, as I reminded my audience, there is a unifying element to it all.  Beyond the life experience that each of us brings to art, there are the basics of technique, in whatever medium being used. 

Being able to draw, from real life, is for me of prime importance.  It doesn't mean that the finished result will even resemble what is in front of one; that is not really the point.  Drawing this way enables one to understand how the object works in space, how it is weighted, how it is articulated, how it smells and feels...  Even if later, the resultant art is abstract, there is a veracity, a knowledge implied that help to convey what the artist is trying to say. This understanding aids in composition, in colour planning in a painting, in catching the light, in organising what one is trying to depict.  Obviously, in a finished drawing, the initial understanding and exploration aid hugely, particularly if the drawing is in silverpoint/metalpoint, where no erasure nor alteration are possible.

Being comfortable in the medium chosen, whether it be watercolour or other painting media, is crucial.  That ease only comes with practice and understanding, but a realistic choice of pigments helps too.  A limited palette is often much more harmonious and does not restrict the range of colours and tones at all.  Being beguiled by all the brightest, newest and most luscious of pigments can be problematic in art! A little restraint often pays off and makes for a less complicated painting process.

Perhaps the most important aspect to me of creating art is learning to listen to that small, interior voice in one's head.  Trust it, because it allows the creation of truly individual pieces of art, expressions of you and you alone. You are a unique person and artist. Your own ideas and visions, your own way of expressing them, in an adequately professional technical fashion, are the path to your own artistic voice, one that will make you different from every other artist.  

Warbler Weaving, Palma - silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist.

As I reminded my audience in Albany, we are all products of complex, rich lives.  Thus our art-making can be equally individualistic and special.  In a way, this silverpoint drawing, Warbler Weaving, that I drew earlier this year, is a symbol of our creative lives as artists.  We weave together so many strands of different things - large, small, fragile, strong- to create art that expresses who we are.  The results go out into the world, sending messages and inviting shared experiences, as the creative circle is completed between artist and viewer. In the same way, this exquisite little nest I found goes from being a home in which to rear nestlings to sharing the warbler's magical creation with a wider human audience.

I was so grateful to the Albany Arts Council and its gracious Executive Director, Carol Hetzler, for allowing me to share my passion for art.  It enabled me to remember that I need to return to creating art, very soon.

Unexpected Gifts to Artists

Sometimes, when it is hard to remember you are an artist because other events crowd in on you in life, there are gifts that come along to remind you about your real passion, art.

One that came to me last year, but has come around at the exact moment I need it most at present, was an invitation to exhibit in a solo show at the Albany Arts Council in Albany, Georgia.  The date has come around, for April 2013, at a point when it is most helpful in my life. 

Brush or Stylus: Jeannine Cook's Choices will open with a reception from 6-8 p.m. on Thursday, April 4th at the Albany Arts Council.  Later, on April 30th, I will be giving an informal talk at a Brown Bag Lunch. 

Azalea indica, metalpoint 10 x 7" image, Jeannine Cook

This is the image used on the invitation, a silverpoint and copperpoint drawing I did of the wonderful, luminous big-flowered azaleas so typical of spring in the Southeast of the United States.

The exhibition will include watercolours - mostly landscapes of coastal Georgia - and silverpoint drawings of flowers, trees and other subjects that lend themselves to this high key lustrous medium.  Since the silver, gold or copper that I use in a stylus cannot be erased, the drawing is always an adventure.

Another gift I was recently given out of the blue was being selected by curator Tania Becker to be included in a six-artist exhibition at Spruill Gallery, Atlanta, Formations: Patterns  in Nature.  Four of my silverpoint drawings, two on a white ground and two on a black ground, were selected. 

Balsam Mountain Beech,

silverpoint, 15 x 11" image, Jeannine Cook

Rings of Time I,

silverpoint on black ground, 7.5 x 5.5" image, Jeannine Cook

Turmoil - Red Oak, silverpoint on black ground, 7.5 x 5.5" image, Jeannine Cook

The exhibition opened on 14th March and will run until June.  It sounds to be an interesting show and I was crestfallen not to be able to get to its opening.  Nonetheless, being in the show was an unexpected surprise.

Another gift from the blue is always when an artist gets a phone call from a collector who says that they have moved to a new home and feel that another "Jeannine Cook" drawing or painting is needed.  What a delicious compliment.

These are the sort of gifts that any artist appreciates, but in my case, as I sit with my husband in a hospital room, far from my studio world, these are vital reminders of my other self.  The gods are kind!

Lessons from Cezanne

Sometimes reading a biography of an artist helps a great deal.  I have just finished the superbly detailed Cezanne: a Life by Alex Danchev, and  am still absorbing the many lessons about art practices, as lived and learnt during Cezanne's life.

Self Portrait with Rose Background, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne, c. 1875.  Image courtesy of a Private Collection

One of the main lessons I derived from this biography and from other wonderful publications and exhibitions of Cezanne's work is that tenacity needs to be allied with a dogged belief in one's own artistic vision or voice.  Despite all his doubts and setbacks, Cezanne kept going back and back to certain subjects - apples, his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire, self-portraits, etc.  Each time, he did something new, something inventive, something better, stronger and more personal.

Curtain, Jug and Fruit, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne, 1894, Private collection

Another lesson that can be learned is how valuable it is to paint sur le motif as Cezanne called plein air painting.  He went out time and time again to work in the sun and heat or difficult conditions - he found new ways to render the landscape.  He told young painters, "The main thing in a painting is finding the right distance."  But finding the correct distance often meant a great deal of innovation, a break from previous, Renaissance traditions of what was far and what was near.  He collapsed distances, he gave us all licence to make horizontals and verticals indistinct one from the other, he showed that colour could serve as "all the ruptures in depth".  In essence, he allowed us all to become 20th/21st century artists who can paint in whatever way seems appropriate.

Mont Sainte-Victoire, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne, 1897. Image courtesy of  Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore

Another vital lesson is that Cezanne looked and looked so hard at his subject - to find its "truth".  He was frantically absorbing all he could about what he was seeing, trying to understand it, trying to grapple with it so that he could mutate it onto his canvas.  "Cezanne at his easel, painting, looking at the countryside: he was truly alone in the world, ardent, focused, alert, respectful," as Renoir wrote. Every artist working from life needs to scrutinise the subject as carefully and attentively as possible - then, and only then, can one really hope to transmute it and interpret it according to oneself.

A lesson which resonates with me is Cezanne's passion for trees - pine trees and olive trees in particular.  He painted them again and again,  depicting them as one would depict a close friend, loved and carefully studied.  They were noble examples of Nature, which resonated so deeply with Cezanne. As Ravaisou is quoted as saying in  Cezanne a Life, "he was a sensualist in art.  He loved nature with a passion, perhaps to the exclusion of all else; he painted in order to prolong within himself the joy of living among the trees."  We can all learn from his paintings of the Large Pine and other tree paintings.

Large Pine and Red Earth, oil on canvas, Paul Cezanne (1890-95). Image courtesy of the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersbourg

Pistachio Tree at Chateau Noir, watercolour with graphite on cream wove paper, laid down on tan wove paper, Paul Cezanne.  Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

Paint with passion - that is what, ultimately, Cezanne seems to be telling us with the art, writings and musings that we have all inherited.

An Early Insight into Art Materials

Happenstance has just given me a lovely gift of information. I was reading a wonderful biography by the late famed British historian, Hugh Trevor Roper, on the 17th century Huguenot physician, Theodore de Mayerne.  Brilliantly intelligent and successful, de Mayerne was first physician to King Henri IV of France, then attended James I of England and his successor, Charles I. 

Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, to give him his full name, was bornin Geneva of French parents in 1573 and lived until 1654/55, ending his days in England.  This is a portrait thought to be done of him in London by Peter Paul Rubens about 1630.

Dr. Theodore de Mayerne, Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1630.  Image courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina

De Mayerne was a multi-faceted scientist, in essence, for his interests and knowledge stretched far beyond the practise of medicine.  Chemist, Hermeticist, experimenter – on one side and on the other, a skilled linguist and writer, high-level diplomat and spy for his Royal employers, as well as deeply knowledgeable expert in art and art materials and practices.  In  short, a true Renaissance man. In 1620, he began with a flourish a new treatise entitled Pictoria, Sculptoria, et quae subalternarum artium. In the many folios, he records observations, derived from reading in part but more from conversations with artists  and craftsmen, about their techniques, technical descriptions of materials used, sources of these materials and their chemical characteristics.

The hand-written title page of the Mayerne manuscript, 'Pictoria, sculptoria et quae subalternarum artium',
England (London), 1620-1646,

Being a very prominent member of three Royal courts, he had the opportunity to meet a wide selection of artists and craftsmen.  He was ever curious and discussed with them different approaches to oil painting, mixing and preparing pigments, the best oils to use, surface preparation, conservation of art, the art of enamelling, watercolour and miniature painting and all manner of other information.  His friendships with Rubens, with Van Dyck, Orazio and his daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi, miniaturists Jean Petitot and John Hoskins and others were fruitful in the detailing of art technology in his folio notes.

Mayerne’s notes on the mixing of colours, taken from Peter Paul Rubens while sitting for his portrait

Dr. Theodore de Mayerne, oil and black chalk, with grey wash, c. 1631, Peter Paul Rubens.  Image courtesy of the British Museum

 Mayerne’s notes on oil, taken from Anthony van Dyck,

De Mayerne continued with this art treatise for a number of years with the last entries in the 170 folios in 1646.  

Folios 5 & 9O, Theodore de Mayerne, Pictoria, Sculptoria...

After his death, the document ended up eventually in the British Library, under the filing, Sloane MS 2052.  From the time of Horace Walpole onwards, it has been considered an indispensable source of information on Dutch and Flemish painting in the Baroque era, allowing later scholars to learn of Northern European diverse art practices. Today, scientists still use De Mayerne's work as a vital source of information for the 17th century, on a par with Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell' Arte for the early 15th century.  Manufacturers of Old Master materials still use De Mayerne's recipes - for  amber resin varnish, for example.  Countless art restorers, in the Prado Museum, the Getty and elsewhere, apparently refer to De Mayerne's careful records about art materials and contemporary techniques.

The more I read, the more I realise there is so much more to learn about.  I started reading Hugh Trevor Roper's wonderful Europe's Physician.  The various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne to learn about an early, prominent physician. I ended up learning about a meticulous chronicler of 17th century art and its practice. What a delicious bonus! 

Symbols Matter

In an article in the Wall Street Journal in May 2012, painter Kenhinde Wiley was discussing his portraits and the realities of being a portrait artist.  He ended by saying that, "You'll never be able to exist in the market place without recognising that paintings are perhaps the most expensive objects in the art world.  (The work) is not going to change anyone's life.  But what it does (is) function as a catalyst for a different way of thinking – symbols matter". (My emphasis.)

Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum in New York City, 'A New Republic", Kehinde Wiley, evoking Napoleon and others

Wiley has been most skilled at suggesting other versions of past masters' portraits of the great and powerful.  His version of portraits by Rubens, Titian, Tiepoloand others are hugely symbolic as they remind us that the previous white-male-dominated world could indeed have been different.

It is not just by offering different versions of history that artists can offer insights into our world.  As artists, whether we realise it or not, we are offering interpretations and meanings about our surroundings and history. As the late Kirk Varnadoe reminded us in Pictures of Nothing - Abstract Art since Pollock, "We are meaning-makers, not just image-makers.  It is not just that we recognise images - it is that we are constructed to make meaning out of things, that we learn from others how to do it."

Take one of the most famous symbolic paintings of the last hundred years, Guernica by Pablo Picasso.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937.  Image courtesy of the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid

It is one of the clearest demonstrations of the power of symbolism in art. It is a reminder that we can all use art in many powerful ways.

Wise Words about Art

In the excellent book about Cezanne recently written by Alex Danchev, there is a quote which is well worth pondering for any artist.

Pissarro and Cezanne painted together a great deal in 1872-74 when Cezanne lived in Auvers and was thus near where Pissarro lived in Pontoise. 

The Hanged Man's House, Auvers, 1873, Paul Cezanne. Image courtesy of the Musee d'Orsay, Paris

They sustained each other in their work and Cezanne learned  from the older artist who was a natural teacher.  Pissarro's teaching was noted down by the young artist,  Louis Le Bail, in 1896-97 and first published by John Rewald.  Danchev requotes it and I am indebted to him for its text.

March Sun, Pontoise, Camille Pissarro, 1875. Image courtesy of the Kunsthalle, Bremen

Pissarro taught us all thus:

Look for the kind of nature that suits your temperament.  The motif should be observed more for shape and colour than for drawing. There is no need to tighten the form which can be obtained without that.  Precise drawing is dry and hampers the impression of the whole, it destroys all sensations. Do not define too closely the outlines of things; it is the brushstroke of the right value and colour which should produce the drawing.  In a mass, the greatest difficulty is not to give the contour in detail, but to paint what is within.  Paint the essential character of things, try to convey it by any means whatsoever, without bothering about technique.  When painting, make a choice of subject, see what is lying at the right and at the left, then work on everything simultaneously.  Don't work bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere, with brushstrokes of the right colour and value, while noticing what is alongside.  Use small brushstrokes and try to put down your perceptions immediately.  The eye should not be fixed on one point, but should take in everything, while observing the reflections which the colours produce on their surroundings.  Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it.  Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you can see nothing more to add.  Observe the aerial perspective well, from the foreground to the horizon, the reflections of sky, of foliage.  Don't be afraid of putting on colour, refine the work little by little.  Don't proceed according to rules and principles, but paint what you observe and feel.  Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.   Don't be timid in front of nature; one must be bold, at the risk of being deceived and making mistakes.  One must have only one master - nature; she is the one always to be consulted.

I don't think one can add much to these wise words

Art as the "Open Sesame" to Experiences

Every time I get involved in art, I learn something new. It is usually something totally unexpected, frequently something delicious.

The most recent insight I have gained through my art - a very minor item but a delight to me - is about the diminutive, secretive but oh-so-melodious warblers who spend a season in my garden. There is a lot of asparagus fern which periodically dies off, so I have been pruning back the dead tendrils and leaves in the interests of "a tidy garden". During the late autumn storms last year, an exquisite small nest blew out of the trees above the ferns. I saved it and am now trying to draw it in silverpoint (still an on-going complexity!). What should I find as the major ingredient, woven in with such skill and elegance, but the dead asparagus fern leaves. So I now learn that my small feathered friends would really appreciate it if I left them all the leaves when they die. That would make their nest-building much more straight-forward! Without art, I would have never known this.

My thanks to Sergey Yeliseev and Frank Vassen for the use of these images of one of the warblers, the  Blackcap, which I know frequent our garden and gives us wonderful songs.

As I was drawing this nest, I remembered a quote I had noted from Eric R. Kandel's book,  The Age of Insight, to which I have alluded in previous blog posts.  He wrote that through art, we can embrace all sorts of aspects of life, from beauty to  violence and ugliness.  "Art enriches our lives by exposing us to ideas, feelings and situations that we might never have experienced, or even want to experience, otherwise.  Art gives us the chance to explore and try out in our imagination a variety of different experiences and emotions."

I am not sure Kandel would have expected the type of example I have just given, but...!  Nonetheless, I was allowed another type of fascination and experience yesterday at an art history class, when the professor examined the restoration and meaning of Peter Bruegel the Elder's The Wine of St Martin's Day, recently acquired by the Prado Museum in Madrid after being shown to them in 2010.  For a start, I was unfamiliar with the medium combination of glue-sized tempera on linen, which was apparently a cheaper way of providing a large painting to a buyer, rather than using a wooden board (more widespread in  the North than the canvas used in Italy for a painting surface).

The Wine of St Martin's Day, c. 1565-1568, Peter Bruegel the Elder.  Image courtesy of the Prado Museum, Madrid

Without exposure to this painting in detail, I would not probably have ever imagined what it was like to participate in the sampling of new wine on 11th November, the  feast day of St. Martin, with such a crowd, people from all walks of life.  It took me on quite a stretch of imagination!