The thing is, I have enough trouble
getting myself to start painting as it is. Part of that is fear; it terrifies
me to see how badly a painting goes at its adolescent stage. But even more—far more—debilitating
to my painting career than that is the conviction that painting is absurd.
Which it is. We are surrounded by
pictures. We have absolutely no need for more. I say every home should have
live art on its walls, but what it does not need is a collection of pretty, pat
scenes that could just as easily come from photographs.
And now, not even an Impressionist can
claim to be superior to the camera. There are programs out there that can turn
a photograph into anything. Long ago I turned one of my own photos into a “copy”
of one of my own paintings—or what could have been one of my paintings, but is
not.
If there were no such thing as
color photography, no Photoshop, no poster-size or wall-size prints, then it
might make sense to dab colored goo onto a flat surface and hope that it would
last forever. That is where things stood at the beginning of Impressionism, and
critics and viewers laughed at the crude application of paint, because there was a need for pretty, perfectly pat
pictures and these Impressionists were not filling it!
There was photography, but not
color photography, so color began to be emphasized in a way it had never been before.
Chevreul had published color swatches made up of patterns of parallel colored
yarns, illustrating how alternating lines of analogous hues made for a
brilliant effect. I only just this year learned about M. Chevreul’s work after
ordering a copy of his book of 1860, and suddenly the brushstrokes of Van Gogh,
Toulouse Lautrec, Cézanne, Cassatt and numerous others made complete sense. With
all my art history courses, all the books I had read, why was it necessary for
me to discover for myself why fin de siècle artists used long parallel
brushstrokes of alternating colors?
At the dawn of the twentieth
century an artist could do something with color which no photograph could do. But
when color photography became available, and in the dark room colors could even
be enhanced, the practice of painting “modulations” faded away, as the Fauves
painted wildly distorted figures in unnatural colors. Almost the entirety of twentieth
century art stands in reaction to photography, one way or another. The more “photographic”
painters, such as Norman Rockwell, were relegated to the status of mere
illustrators. Abstract art (later to be called non-representational art),
happenings, installations, all stood against a backdrop of photography. And
photography was everywhere: snapshots, magazines, movies, billboards.
So where does all this lead us?
I don’t find perfect art very
interesting. Photorealism—and I see more and more of it these days—cannot hold
my interest beyond a brief admiration that someone could and would take the
time to do that. And non-representational images are everywhere, man-made and
in nature. I enjoy looking at a pretty pattern as much as the next person, but
it takes more than that to turn me on. By the same token, I enjoy a colorful
sunset or towering clouds, but am not inspired by them to make a painting—or even
a photograph any more. They are for observing and remembering.
Even other works of art that follow
the rules of their given style, whatever style that may be, soon cease to
intrigue me. It’s because perfect art exists, everywhere, in plenitude, and can
be simulated by computer anyway. I may enjoy looking at it for a while, but I do
lose interest, and I certainly do not want to make yet another example of it.
Cézanne’s work exemplifies art that
remains intriguing. Art historians teach that Cézanne reacted against the
Impressionists and their breakdown of solid form. Since they were painting with
light, he chose to represent solid form not with light and shade, but with
features of the colors themselves. Surfaces that faced the viewer, and were
nearby, were to be painted in warm tones. Where the form turned away from the
viewer, its color cooled, even to blue. (Personally, I am sick to death of the notion
that warm colors come forward and cool colors recede. I am fed up with the
oversimplification of colors into the two groups warm and cool, and fervently
wish we could learn to categorize color more accurately and meaningfully—but that’s
another topic.)
After all that careful and subtle
work toward using color to create the illusion of solid form, Cézanne slams our
perception back into two dimensions by rendering a wine bottle asymmetrically,
and by mismatching the back edge of a table top as seen on opposite sides of
the painting.
Why did he do that? Well, whatever
the reason, it was not by accident—these were not mistakes—though critics of
the day might have thought so. Cézanne’s paintings are fraught with contradictions
and tensions, and while he may have been unable to paint like an old master,
still he was skillful enough to avoid those “mistakes.” His reasons were formal; he made a deliberate
choice of just how high to make this side of the table top, or just how low to
make that shoulder of the wine bottle. He may or may not have been able to
explain in words, but he knew what he wanted and executed his intentions.
You could look for hours and days
and years, and still find something to wonder at.
Now to my work, Three Little Birds, and three of its “faults.”
As it recedes, the wire which
reflects the sun does not thin “enough.” I did make a conscious decision to
render this wire thinner in the distance, but only as much as this. Are you not
convinced by the rest of the painting that I have the skill to render it in
proper perspective? So why did I not?
It is not plausible that three
wires would reduce to one at that distant pole. Well, they did, but here I must
confess to thoughtlessly copying what I saw without prior thought. Still, for
me, this thickness and triple wire save this painting.
The dark wires crossing the scene
have no definite end. True. What would happen to this painting if they did? I don’t
like to think about it. Or should I say the viewer might like to think about it?
Many of my paintings have such “faults.”
Most of the time, quite honestly, these faults show up and I keep them because
I like what they do for the work. “Faults” that do not work toward my visual
ends, of course, I correct. But I am not painting pretty scenes. I aspire to
more than impressionism. I prefer these “faults” to their alternatives. I am
wondering this morning if perhaps my paintings that I do not like so much are
the ones with no contradictions or implausibilities.
But especially interesting to me
right now is that I had been entertaining the idea of magnifying such faults before the discussion that inspired this brief
essay took place. I think, though, that I shall leave them subtle and troubling
for the time being.
