I’ve enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten on The Path. It’s meant to be somewhat enigmatic — in the placement and intent of the “narrator” (who’s on the path? are they on it or above it?); in the nature of the black void on the right; and the ultimate destination of this solitary path. A fellow artist said she sees the texture within the path itself as a reflection — or maybe even an on-the-ground manifestation — of the stars in the sky above. I love that.
Abstraction
A new blue /
Recently I discovered my new favorite color — it’s a deep, rich blue that I get from mixing Cobalt Blue with Ultramarine Blue. I get the “true” blue and good opacity from the Cobalt, and depth from the Ultramarine, which has a little red tinge to enrich the mix.
I worked on this to get the depth I wanted for Cusp, where the blue is pushing through white and has to contend with an unambiguously red protuberance (you tell me what it is). I was so excited by this color (it’s what I always wanted Cobalt Blue to be) that I contrasted it to gold in three 12”x 12” panels: for P-Generator, where I graded it with white; for Flora & Fauna, where I poured in onto the panel and then dripped gold over it; and for Quickening, where I mixed the blue with gel medium to create a rough texture around a smooth golden shape.
Lots of potential interpretations of these four abstractions — I’ve tried to use the titles to get your mind started.
and then our world changed /
Note that I didn’t title this “and then the world changed.” Most elements of our physical world have not changed – the buildings and mountains still stand, birds and insects move about and reproduce, and we certainly still have weather. Continuity abounds.
John and I are fine and grateful. I do most of my academic work and my painting at home anyway, and I have always cooked most of our meals. I’ve reformatted my courses to be accessed entirely through a “learning management system,” but the fine-tuning and grading continues apace.
I’ve started a series of paintings in my current favorite format – smooth 12”x 12” hardwood panels, cradled atop a 1½“ frame, so they present well without any further framing. The series is Dovic, and generally entails straight-sided figures in muted colors, with the shape and shade of the figures implying spatial relationships. The minimalist approach seems in keeping with these fluid, shape-changing times.
About what do we paint? /
Continuing my reading of Meyer Schapiro ("The value of modern art" (1948) in Worldview in Painting: Art and Society),
Schapiro acknowledged the heterogeneity of early- and mid-century visual arts. But he went on to apply a broader view of its commonalities. “However, if we consider the art of our time – and I speak only of that art which is fresh and original and could not have been done in a previous age – I believe it is possible to discover in it certain features that set it apart from the work of preceding times” [134; emphasis added]. Citing claims that modern art does not have subject matter, Schapiro asserted “in the art of the last fifty or seventy-five years [before his 1948 presentation], types of subject matter that are sufficiently standard and characteristic” [134]:
1) direct observations of everyday life
2) the life and work of the artist
3) “the consciousness of art itself: [paintings in which] the constituting elements do not form images or signs for objects, but are themselves ideal figures of elementary operations in the shaping of things; these, too, are an important subject matter of art, drawn from art itself” [135]
4) “the interior world of the artist,” expressed through non-representational composition of color, line, shape, and/or brush strokes.
Schapiro compared these themes to those of earlier periods of Western painting. “If the art of the Middle Ages is about supernatural beings whom one never saw directly or in ordinary vision, if the art of the Renaissance is about mythological and historical figures, and if the art of the Baroque period is rich in moral and political allegories, then the art of the last seventy-five years is about ourselves” [137].
If modern artists are individualistic, and face no art-world limitations on subject matter, why was there, up to Schapiro’s writing, so little reference to human inequality and suffering in modern art? Schapiro turned to this question at the end of his essay or lecture, and gave it too short a treatment. He glossed over the paintings emphasizing the horrors of twentieth-century war, for example. He suggested that modern artists’ reliance on individual patrons and purchases disciplined them to emphasize themes of leisure or related to pleasure.