The Yellow Painter

A canoe is tethered to a dock with a yellow cord, called a painter. It is a light cord; it doesn’t take much to hold a canoe captive. A gentle breeze quickens the water, and the boat pulls gently at the painter, holding it taut.

Isn’t it like that for each of us? The ties that bind us to our moorings are mere strings and, for most of our lives, the tug to freedom is really quite gentle. And do we want that freedom? What happens to this canoe without the painter? What happens to me if I slip away? What happens to you? Do we truly want to be adrift, even though we tug?

The title of this work is a bit of a pun, and my intention was that the two definitions of the word “painter” each be meaningful. How does a painter hold two worlds together?

The composition of this image is strongly diagonal. Only the water has any semblance of horizontality. The boat is actively angled, but so is the dock—and so is the painter.

The side of the boat is a large mass of fairly bright red, and if we are sensitive to color, we are drawn to notice that the blue, out-of-date sticker (this was painted in 2013) is of a similar intensity. As is the painter. These three colors constitute the primary triad. Now we notice the muted colors of the world in which the canoe rests. Perhaps as we muse we match up the muted blues and greens, and then go for the grays. Next, if we are really into color, we compare the relationship of the triad of primary hues with the bundle of muted colors and the grays.

Or you might follow lines, or the masses. I leave further musings to you, though this image is a very poor substitute for the original.

This is why I believe that paintings belong on walls where people live and work, in houses and offices. I detest mausoleums—I mean museums—and attend them only out of necessity. Galleries make good orphanages for art—and you should know that the artist really does feel like she is abandoning her work—because a gallery provides a place where you can meet a painting that has a future for you, and then take it home and live with it.

A painting does worlds more than decorate your house, just as does your spouse. A painting offers one side of a conversation, and you keep up your end through reverie and contemplation. What you notice about a painting, if it works for you, was probably thought about and put there deliberately by the artist. You might be very surprised to know the care we artists take in the creation of a work of art. The intention is that your conversation with the painting will occupy you for hours and years—that is what makes a painting good, not so much that it “looks like a photograph” or is pretty or is any better than you could do.

There is no right set of things to notice about a painting, or to think about, or to muse upon. The only no-no, in my opinion, is to make up a back-story and impute it to the artist. If you had a teacher who led you to that practice, well, education is in a sorry state, isn’t it? The true back-story to this image is that my daughter Julia and I spent a week paddling the Everglades. Every evening we tied up to a wooden, roofed platform called a chickee. On the afternoon when this painting was conceived I sat and watched the canoe play at its tether, and watched the shapes and colors and began thinking about a new painting.

Angela’s Nap

I started this drawing of my nineteen-year-old daughter Angela last weekend. As you can see, I was groping a bit. Each of those lines was drawn carefully, even if later abandoned. I am sure there are many who would scold me for showing this very vulnerable exploration on the blog now, before any of my finished work—first impressions and all, you know—but it makes my point more dramatically than the paintings or a finished drawing might.

This drawing is unfinished for a simple reason: Angela rolled over. But it accomplishes, very bravely for a drawing if I may say so, expression of the idea behind much of my work: we have a propensity to make sense out of what we see, even on the basis of the sketchiest information. We see dragons and cows in the sky; we see faces in wallpaper stains, grotesque figures in tree trunks, and the Virgin Mary in half-eaten pieces of toast. We’re happy about that, we accept it; but we barely appreciate the full implications of our extra-reality perceptions, and it’s really all about us.

Take a look at my little drawing, if you don’t mind. That left eye, for me, is absolutely Angela. Others, by the way, may disagree and that’s all right. What is important is that somebody, anybody, looks at some graphite scribbles on white paper and has that recognition sensation—Angela! If you don’t see Angela there in that eye, certainly you have had the experience of recognizing a person in a drawing. Even if you have never seen a drawing of a family member or friend, you have seen drawings of famous people in magazines or online and recognized them.

If you look closely enough at my rendering of Angela’s left eye, it will not look like an eye at all. Look closely and you will see scribbles. Look closely enough at a high definition photograph, even, and the image will collapse into patches of meaningless color. On the computer pictures turn out to be made of little squares. Artists have been aware of the dissolution of recognizable image into color patches—or the resolution of brushstrokes into image—for a long time.

I’m not telling you anything new, but I want you to think how we take this for granted. Even the loosest of Impressionists was making it easy for us to perceive brushstrokes as object. It amazes me that under even the most adverse conditions we turn things into recognizable images. Animals don’t do that. Most animals, anyway, do not see figures in drawings or photographs or piles of hay. So I just want to settle into a state of wonder about us for a while.

Look back at the drawing of Angela. The left eye was easy to recognize. The arms and hands are a little more challenging, but we still see arms and hands, even though I have not erased the lines I rejected. The hair looks nothing like hair—but don’t you see hair? The remaining facial features are not really there—those are just light notes to myself about placement—and yet we see the other eye, the nose, the mouth. We may not like what we see (I don’t!), because if those were accurately drawn they would be misshapen, but we do see features, and because one part of the drawing looks to be somewhat accurate, we fear these other features might be also.  And then look at the long wiggly lines away from the face and hands. You “see” a solid figure, clothes, a sofa in spite of the dearth of detail.

A lot of artists and teachers go to a lot of trouble to enhance an illusion in a painting, and others speak about destroying it. Please understand that I am emphasizing neither, that I want to marvel at the perceptual process, and that, to me, the most interesting experience I hope to provide my viewer is wonder in her own perception.