Artists' Philosophies

It is always fascinating to read what other artists have thought about the state and office of being an artist. Many times, I find myself reading something an artist has written and I think, oh yes, exactly, that is what I think or feel. It is nice that there is often a community of thought between artists, even separated by many  generations. I suppose it is really because the demands of art creation remain essentially those of finding a means to express thoughts, passions, emotions that can be communicated to others, visually, audibly, in tactile fashion. In a way, an artist is, willy nilly, a conduit for personal or societal issues and interests, joys and sorrows, stories and inventions.

Some of Josef Albers' philosophical statements are both pithy and very relevant to every artist. For instance: "The content of art: Visual formulations of our reactions to life." Or: "The aim of art: Revelation and evocation of vision."

Grey Facade, oil on masonite, 1947-54, Josef Albers (image courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation)

Variant, Orange Front, oil on masonite, 1948-58, Josef Albers (image courtesy of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation)

It is remarkable to think about the diversity of reactions to life shown by artists thought the ages and even more so today, in the wide-open world we all evolve in. It is testimony to both artists' individuality and their cohesion that the art created is often such a powerful evocation of their vision and that it can be understood and shared by such wide and far-flung publics.

The aspects of revelation and evocation of vision are tackled with many different means. Painting, video, sculpture, photography, drawing

Study of Stag, Lucas Cranach the Elder,, 1520-30 (image courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum)

Study, black chalk on tinted paper, 1515-1516, Titian (image courtesy of Asmolean Museum, Oxford)

Head of Bearded Man, 1523-25, red chalk,, Francesco Mazzola Parmigianino, (Image courtesy of Städl Museum, Frankfurt)

Artist, Australian Brett Whiteley, said something very wise about drawing: "(It)i s the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace or probing authoritatively the unknown."

Shankar, 1966, charcoal, ink, spray paint, enamel, collage on paper. Brett Whiteley (Image courtesy of Art Gallery, New South Wales)

Another interesting remark about drawing: "Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking." Convoluted but in essence, this remark of Martin Heidegger harks back to what Albers said about our reactions to life in art making.

Design for disputa, c. 1508-09, pen & ink , black chalk, Raphael (image courtesy of Stadl Museum, Frankfurt)

Actually the artist's thinking involves a lot of effort even before the hand begins to draw or paint. The initial idea for the creation necessitates decisions about medium, support, size of work, choice of colour (or not), even to work in the studio or outside. The hand's actions then reflect all these earlier thoughts and decisions, even if the actual art is more visceral and seemingly spontaneous.

All serious art-making is underpinned by care and effort and, consciously or not, by  thoughts and observations that add up to that artist's philosophy.  Often these philosophies are not articulated as such, but sooner or later, each artist, talking or writing about creating art, will begin to enunciate these thoughts. Artists' statement, for instance, are a vehicle for these thoughts.  (However, I recently discovered that there are websites where you plug in various characteristics of your art, your age, etc., and hey presto, you have a seemingly skilled sample of "arts-speak" that says everything and in truth nothing at all - the very opposite of thinking about one's personal artistic philosophy.)

Perhaps it is an indication of deepening artistic experience and - ideally - skill that an artist can talk coherently and interestingly about what moves him or her to create art, what is important, how it is achieved.  Somehow it is part of our collective heritage that artists can talk of  how and why  their art forms part of the extraordinary continuum of creative endeavour that links artists and humanity in general down the ages.

A Sense of Things

The Telfair Museum in Savannah  is currently showing a vibrant collection of Robert Henri's portraits done in Spain, Spanish Sojourns: Robert Henri and the Spirit of Spain.  Henri was an important American artist in the early 20th century realist Ashcan Movement.  He excelled at portraiture, was a noted teacher and left an extensive, wide-ranging body of work.

Etching of Robert Henri by Ashcan artist John Sloan 1902

The Telfair exhibition captures the flash, bravado and complexity of Spanish culture, as Henri experienced it during his seven visits there between 1900 and 1926.  His often full length portraits of dancers, gypsies, bullfighters and peasants convey a bold sense of each sitter's individuality, a sense of that person at that moment in time.

The Spanish Gypsy, 1912, Robert Henri (American, 1865–1929) (Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Robert Henri himself remarked, "Drawing is not following a line on the model; it is drawing your sense of the thing." His drawings are often succinct, but they do convey that sense of what he saw and experienced. His paintings capture the same feeling, as he clearly drew with his paintbrush as well as with other media.  There is a fascinating and extensive collection of Henri's paintings and a few drawings at Poul Webb's blog, Art & Artists, and as you scroll through the images, each portrait is indeed clearly of an individual,  However, as always, I tend to gravitate to the drawings and landscapes, rather than the portraiture.  They often seem more powerfully to capture Henri's own dictum about the "sense of the thing".

Robert Henri, Pencil Drawing of a Small Child

Robert Henri, Images of Figures Sitting at an Outdoor Café, graphite on paper

Robert Henri, Nude Model with Blue and Red Skirt, watercolour, (Image courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Robert Henri, 1906 Procession in Spain, oil on canvas, Private collection

Robert Henri, 1910, Morning Reflection, oil on canvas, Private collection

Robert Henri, 1913, Irish Landscape, oil on canvas, Private collecton

Robert Henri, 1913, West Coast of Ireland, oil on canvas (Image courtesy of Everson Museum of Art - Syracuse, NY)

Yet, despite all the serious drawing and painting he did, one of the delicious comments that Henri left is this drawing.

Robert Henri, 1910-12, For Art's Sake, pen & ink on paper

He certainly caught the sense of things!

Improving the Capacity to Learn

I have been slowly reading an extraordinary tome while I listen to the early morning birdsong greeting the sunrise.

It is a huge book, but well worth reading: The Primacy of Drawing by Deanna Petherbridge is the result of ten years’ research and careful thought about drawing, in all its implications and manifestations.

With wonderful illustrations of drawings from a multitude of public and private collections, Dr. Petherbridge delves into all the aspects of historical and contemporary drawing approaches and philosophies.

Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, Galleria dell' Accademia, Venice (1485-90)

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most notable of the Renaissance artists to combine art with science in his endless quest to learn about the world around him.  Other artists, for centuries, have used life drawing, from casts or live models, as a way of learning about the human body and honing their artistic skills.

Life drawing class. c. 1890, (Photo courtesy Leeds Museums and Galleries (Art Gallery))

Deanna Petherbridge discusses many interesting approaches to drawing, but one summation, at the end of a chapter on “Drawing and Learning”, struck me as very apposite indeed in today’s world. I quote it in full, with thanks to its author:

"Learning to observe, to investigate, to analyse, to compare, to critique, to select, to imagine, to play and to invent constitutes the veritable paradigm of functioning effectively in the world.” (My italics.) 

I think that every teacher should think hard about including art, and especially drawing, in the preparation of today’s generations in school, college and university.

Everyone would benefit, now and in the future.

Thoughts on Ingres as a Source of Art

The other day, I attended an artist’s talk for an exhibition opening at the Ingres Museum in Montauban, a delightful small town in South France.

It was thought-provoking, albeit not perhaps quite as the artist intended.

Flyer for the Ingres Museum show on Vincent Carpet

Vincent Carpet is a French artist, born in Paris in 1958, who came to art because there seemed nothing else viable for him to do.

His career really took off, apparently, when he exhibited with two other artists in a very controversial show, Masculin-Féminin, le sexe de l’art, at the Centre GeorgesPompidou Paris. Since then, he has increasingly specialized in using an artist’s work to develop his own version of that work, often with what seems to be a very ironic eye.

It was in this context that he is now exhibiting his work in the Ingres Museum Montauban is Ingres’ home town and the museum owns a huge number of Ingres’ drawings and many important paintings. So Vincent Corpet was invited to select a number of Ingres’ works, paintings and drawings, and develop his own reactive work, to be hung alongside the original work. The show is called Vincent Corpet vit au long d'Ingres.

His talk at the Museum, given to a very small number of people, was ironic, rich in facile remarks and occasional honest moments, such as when he admitted getting totally bored with trying to find what else to do and say when faced with all the multitude of Ingres’ portraits.

Another such moment was when he said he couldn’t paint hands or feet, so he simply stuck his hand or foot in paint and walked on the canvas to leave the imprint. His method of work, apparently, is to make a black and white, quick and dirty copy of the original painting, with the canvas on the floor, as one personage.

He then changes to being another person, in his mind, and selects out things to emphasise and reinterpret, mostly with fantasy animals, upside down, sideways or whatever. He then changes again to another person and covers the rest of the canvas in some simple colour, painted on rather as one would paint a wall, it appeared. Only when the three stages are completed is the canvas placed upright.

Vincent Corpet at work

His drawings were simpler and more painterly, but very repetitive, with sexual forms predominating, with a lot of smudging, erasing the black with spirits to get tonal changes.

He had also made the selection of Ingres’ drawings to go with his drawings, but alas, many of them were so faint that they were almost invisible. He had apparently made a very quick selection on the web of these drawings, not seeing them in the original, which was perhaps sometimes unfortunate.

The overall impression on was left with after this talk was that this was an artist who had perfected the game of parleying his skills into a career in the official art world. Derivative and shallow art is apparently quite acceptable, as long as there is shock value. To me, his talk was short on depth of thought, and thus on impact.

Tackling a take-off of Ingres, himself very much a product of the 19th century traditional art world and not so hot on accurate drawing of the human body, for instance, is not an easy task. Nonetheless, the “translation” done by Vincent Corpet into 21st century idiom simply reminded me of the existence of a potentially shallow, transitory and basically ugly sector of today’s art world. 

In essence, the talk became a reminder to me personally as an artist that one needs to try to dig as deeply and thoughtfully as possible inside one’s own world, not to copy and not to be facile.

Not easy!

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

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.

The Dynamics of a Blank Piece of Paper

We artists have all faced the blank sheet of white paper or canvas, time and time again. It can be a daunting moment. Yet it can also be the start of a fascinating balancing act, whose dynamics hark back to the earliest cave drawings, the origins of calligraphy and the vast heritage of both Eastern and Western art-making.

"Tabula rasa"

Some while ago, I found a marvellous statement by the wonderful British artist, Rebecca Salter,about the state of a piece of paper. She talked of an old Chinese saying that "a piece of paper is not empty until you have made the first mark", a saying which underlines the dynamics between a mark that you make on that paper and the blank space around it.  She continued by saying that "the word 'blank' is, however, misleading as the space, instead of becoming a space of nothingness, is 'activated by the presence of the drawn or painted mark".

This concepts seems to go to the very heart of composition, of a sense of balance and fitness of the symbiotic relationship of the marks placed on that surface.  It also ensures that your particular style, your hallmark as an artist, will be evident from the dynamics of your choices of marks made on that blank sheet of paper.

Calligraphy, from all traditions, has been based on this concept of dynamic balance on the page.

Japanese calligraphy

Ottoman tugra of Suleiman the Magnificent,1520, with flowers and saz leaves

Present-day Western calligraphy

These examples from different types of calligraphy are wonderful examples of the dynamics that can be created on a black piece of paper. However, we can all be mindful of those potential relationships that we can work with when we face that sheet of paper.

Art and Photography

Recently, I seem to have been seeing more and more allusions to artists who make or have made considered efforts to make art that in some way fights back against the all-pervasive influence of photography.

Turner was one of the first artists to do this, at a time when photography was newly invented.  (The Frenchman, Niepce, made the first permanent photograph in 1826.) 

Joseph Nicephore Niepce

By 1819, Turner had already begun to move away from paintings that were faithful reproductions of the world around him after a visit to Venice. 

 Ivy Bridge, Devonshire, c.1813-1814, J.M.W. Turner (Image courtesy of the Tate.org.uk)

He continued, however, to make careful studies of clouds, of storms and waves, for instance, which were the underpinnings of many of his paintings. His interest was far more directed towards capturing his vision of things, rather than reproducing the exact likeness of the world around him.  It was thus a way of rebutting the influence of photography's slavish capturing of appearances.

Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands, 1835, J.M.W. Turner (Image courtesy of the Tate.org.uk)

Ever since the invention of photography, there has been this tug of war between "fine art" and photographs, a contest that de facto seems to be have won in large part by photography. One ironic measure of this in our parlous economic times is the number of photography exhibitions in museums which has greatly increased in recent years.  One suspects that costs of mounting and insuring such exhibitions might be a consideration. The prices of photographs is also climbing steadily for many historic works as well as contemporary prints.

Photographs have also become the drawing book of preference for many artists, as opposed to actually drawing scenes or objects that will be later incorporated into a work of art. Many artists go as far as simply reproducing the contents of a photograph, ideally one that they have taken themselves as opposed to using someone else's and thus infringing on copyright.  There is always a danger in using a photo for art - if the artist is not already very familiar with the object or scene, having drawn or painted it before many a time, a photograph can be a fickle friend.  The camera lens cannot "see" all that the human an eye can see, so a great deal of information is missing that might help in creating a work of art.  Added to that, a work of art based too heavily on a photograph tends to have a frozen look, airless and static.  Somehow, the image has not been processed through the artist's eyes-brain-hand in the same way as it would have been if drawn or painted from life.

Every artist today has to decide just what role photos should play in the production of his or her art. Whether the art is realistic, abstract or in between, photography can be a useful tool or a demanding taskmaster.  Each of us has a interesting choice to make.

Celebrating Drawing

I always love it when out of the blue, one learns of the celebration of the art of drawing.

Just a small entry in today's Spanish papers, but a good piece of news for all of us who think that drawing is just as important as painting. Miquel Barcelo, the highly successful artist from Mallorca, has just been awarded the Penages Award for Drawing from the Mapfre Foundation in Spain. In his acceptance speech, he talked of the fact that he finds that, " Es gracioso pensar que la pintura ha muerto y el dibujo no" -explicó en referencia a aquellos que dan por muerto este arte-. Como si muere Dios pero la Virgen María siguiese viva" ( a quote from the Diario de Mallorca, that it is somewhat ironic to think that painting has died whilst drawing survives, as if God had died but the Virgin Mary remains alive). He received the award in Madrid, with Princess Elena present at the ceremony.

Barcelo's drawings and etchings are indeed a delight with their fluid ease and grace.

Marche de Shange, la Jupe Verte (the Green Skirt),  mixed media, 2000, Miguel Barceló (image courtesy of the website of Paola Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co)

Barceló has spent a lot of tiime in Africa, especially in Mali, and his images capture the essence of Africa.

This 1999 etching is from his series of works from the Balearic island of Lanzarote, entitled Lanzarote XXV, courtesy of ArtNet.

This is another of the Lanzarote series, a wonderful depiction of dogs.

I delight when an artist celebrates drawing as does Miquel Barceló. He inspires us all to keep drawing.

Drawing

One of the nice aspects of the contemporary art world is how drawing is thriving.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when I started seriously learning of the American art world, draughtsmen and women seemed to have a rather thin time. It was a very rare connoisseur, especially in the United States, who either knew much about drawing media or appreciated drawings for the sake of drawings. The Drawing Center in New York, for example, was founded in 1977. Interestingly, it claims in its mission statement still to be the only not-for-profit fine arts institution in the country to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.

Few young artists were taught to draw - it was not really considered necessary, it seemed. Life drawing was the domain of the few, and eye-hand coordination skills were seldom talked about. The Natural Way to Draw, Nicolaides' now-famous book, completed after his death by a friend and student,Mamie Harnon, was little known, I learned. Silverpoint drawing was virtually unknown - there were very few artists using this medium.

Slowly, slowly, there has been a groundswell in the drawing world. A few exhibitions here and there, more and more institutions, like the Arkansas Arts Center, seriously collecting contemporary works on paper which were mostly drawings in different media... more courses taught. For silverpoint, there was the seminal exhibition in 1985, curated by Dr. Bruce Weber, at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Fl, called The Fine Line: Drawing with Silver in America.

Now, there is a wonderful change. Not only are there regularly Master Drawing exhibits around the country, but there is a great deal of interest generated by the institutions famed for their drawing collections, ranging from the National Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Morgan Library in New York. Courses are widely offered, magazines devoted to draughtsmanship. Galleries are more willing to show contemporary drawings. You know there is wide acceptance of an art form when art fairs begin to focus on it. For instance, this is the sixth year that the fair, "Master Drawings New York", is being held across twenty blocks of New York's' Upper East Side, for nine days , as of 20th January. Its co-founder, Crispian Riley-Smith, is quoted in this month's Art+Auction magazine, as saying, "Drawings are quite intimate, and people need to take their time to look at them."

Another indication of how widespread is the acceptance and practice of the many drawing media are now is to glance through one the the art catalogues that land in one's mail box (surprisingly in today's on-line commercial world!). Jerry's Artarama, for example, has 51 pages in its "Drawing" section, and that does not include any of the pages devoted to Paper (which constitutes another 48-odd pages). The total catalogue has some 560 pages for everything, from paint to frames... so you can judge how important drawing has become to the purveyors of art materials.

As with every skill that becomes more widespread and more accepted, there is a flowering of ideas, of innovations and approaches. New materials used, fresh combinations of media, different ways to express oneself - the state of drawing is vibrant and healthy. What fun and how wonderful to see this happen. A good omen for 2012.