This is something I did recently

This is a large crayon drawing, approximately 60 x 45 inches.

An early painting

This is how I began painting when a mere youth.

Reaping what you sow

Contemporary art actively opposes drawing, subtlety, beauty and dignity. Art forms with positive qualities are proudly snubbed.

The old masters lived in times that fostered beauty, narrative, myth and idealism. And there were a lot of great artists.

We live in an era that fosters pretensions poseurs, and we are inundated with charlatans.

Bonnard said that "they just don't know how to see"

People who themselves don't know how to see fail to grasp the significance of the distinctions one makes between slavish imitation of current forms verses a playful and innovative use of the past. In the past one finds something that is always new. On finds permanent human catgories of being that are not actually present in all eras but can be potentially so.

Late Cezanne Paintings of Mont Ste. Victoire

Cezanne's great mountain pictures made near the end of his life (like Wolf Kahn's early "white" paintings) are nearly impossible to photograph. Are as beautiful as jewels, need time to see properly. You cannot just glance at something like that and suppose that you are seeing it. Every touch is like a separate thought -- about color, about the air, about time, about the distance between him and the mountain. An art like that, what becomes of it in our rushed era?

How can we fool ourselves into thinking we care about nature when we don't even have the time to look at the sky?

Meanwhile, artists! Artists cheat themselves of the freedom that they could have. It begins with a freedom to examine your own life and a freedom to use your own ideas. It needs to be grounded in a resistance to other people telling you what art is.

Do we suppose that these others have superior authority upon which they draw their final word when they tell us what art is. Did someone tell Cezanne what art is? (He had his critics.)

The artist is the one who needs to be doing the telling. What genuine artist needs to be taken by the hand and told, "dear, we're not painting like that anymore."

We're not? Well, sweetheart, maybe I am.

If your art blossoms in conformity to the hip avant garde, and that's your heart, then fine. But if you just listen to the authorities in their hipness then somebody else is telling you what art is. Might as well let that person make the damned art.

the landscape in your mind

Someone said Provence was the place to paint, naturally preferable to, say, Gainesville, Florida, or to my home town or your home town. It's superiority was something that went without saying ... at least I never heard anyone offer an explanation about why painting in France was intrisically better than painting in Newark. Well, other than the light. Hey, we've got light. All things being equal, is a tree in France better than a tree in Sacramento?

Okay. I have nothing against France, love France and would happily paint France as well as paint any other place. The motif would be wonderful. To that I'll attest. But I'm fairly certain the real locale will be the France in my head, or in my eyes, and not the France of the French.

Many have become disciples of the "modern," which is to say they don't even want to paint France anymore. Why do people adopt the modern way of the Donald Judd box? (Or, Donald Judd box knock offs.) I can understand why those who cannot draw and cannot see do. But artists of genuine and potential talent, why do they abandon their own vision for the ubiquitous and suspiciously facile path of Modern Art.

Am I not modern? Are my thoughts not as much of the present tense as anybody elses? What becomes of the personal insight, the life lived in art, through art, once we give ourselves up to trends? Why do people not defend their own view? Even especially when if their thing has the added gravitas of having been "made in France."

Why do we not, like Delacroix, paint "par coeur"?

painting apples

One thing about the old masters -- I'm looking at Cezanne -- is their humility and their tightly focused gaze. What if I want, like Cezanne, to paint apples that are vividly red-orange and that are also dark in the shadows, and put them against a porceline dish that has vilet markings, markings which one blurs so that you can tell they are decorations and yet have them become beautiful, vague and subtle abstractions of the real design of the porceline?

To have deep color effect and mood, but without detail. To invent an image that is as much a thought about the objects as it is a deeply perceptual recording of them.

If I wanted all that, where is the support for it? An art that requires time to slowly unfold, an art that stares at life and makes quiet, silent observations about things, an art that is like the novelist's art, that finds a humanity in things, standing in for absent actors. To have things in a penetrating arrangment where thoughts and feelings can hide.

The contemporary idea of art has turned its back on this. Calling it traditional, the critics of perceptual painting do not really understand the thing they dismiss. Certainly they do not see it's ever pliable use, how it is ever a reservoir of meaning. Yes, "traditional" art is hard to make into a modern idiom -- is easy as a temptation to fall into convention. But it's the failure of imagination that prevents traditional subjects from becoming new again. The subject is not at fault, nor is the basic approach. It's just that it's very difficult to do this, and it requires an artist of rare ability.

If an artist wants to test his or her own skill at invention, try painting something that has been painting over and over again through history. If you can make a still life of apples that has meaning and depth, you've done something. Because this easy subject is perhaps the hardest kind of thing to paint in an original way -- especially to make something original without descending into mannerism.