Visual Handwriting

Above: 52.25 x 60 inches, crayon drawing. Below: 50 x 56 inches, acrylic painting.

These two pictures might look very different, but I see them as closely related. Though one is abstract and the other depicts a lilypond, they both arrange the space in similar ways. "Things" quite literally appear in the same positions, only in the first the things are discrete shapes and in the second they are subjects of the motif (water lilies, distant trees, different areas of the pond, etc.). Both pictures are approximately the same size, though the first is a drawing.

I made them at different times, was not thinking about the first, when I made the second. I was not aware of any relationship between them. And it's precisely this subliminal element that I find so intriguing about art making. You learn things about yourself, about the ways that your mind works, about how you organize things without even thinking about it.

I see one of the failings of the modern rejection of pictorial media as being this lost connection with the unconscious mind. Yes, it's true that one will find similarly telling repetitions in a video, or in someone's installation assemblage. But the act of making with the eyes and the hands -- it has a "je ne sais quoi." It is much more direct than the intermediate means so favored by artists trying to be trendy. Drawing and painting are more raw, less edited.

Drawing lets you use freedom as not other material does. The image goes from a mental impression to a gesture immediately.

And that makes all the difference.

I guess the next question I ask myself, upon seeing that the two images are definitely related, is: What does the abstract one mean?

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"?