Some Thoughts On Painting Part 4: Open, Closed, Open, Closed

I'm reshaping my painting studio and as I do so I am also organizing and going through the many, many notes I took during school and the few workshops I've taken over the last few years. In rereading notes from different teachers it is interesting to compare notes as it were, compare not only technical things but also reflect on the philosophical differences and similarities. I know that amongst the painters from PAFA , or I should say the figurative painters there are many things in common at the core and maybe the real big difference between the various camps and sub-camps is the use of the camera. Noel doesn't dig it, yet Desiderio, Kanevsky do use it. That aside, I think all of these artists love paint and the sensual qualities it can deliver through the mark of an artist no other form or art can deliver.

In my previous post I talked about how Noel liked to build and destroy, as did Van Dyck. They share that in common as a motif of attack with Kanevsky and Redmond.

                                                     Salvator Mundi by Leonard Da Vinci

I think the term Open Form is part of all of these artists process, and the bulk of the painters seem to work in this way who come out of the academy. In fact Closed Form painting (where the forms are self contained  and complete, balanced--think David) is rather looked down upon or given a hard time at the academy by many teachers and critics.  Another term for this "blurry" approach as I call it, is sfumato, "to evaporate like smoke", and this approach to painting comes down to us through the language of painting from Leonardo da Vinci.

                                                                             Turner
By keeping the borders of the forms open, blurring the edges or the positive and negative it creates a strong sense of space in a painting. J.M.W Turner's paintings would be a great example of this, and some hail his work as the spark informing the work of later artists and movements like the Impressionists and the Abstract Expressionists.  So with all of this paint language loaded in my mind as a student and a painter its interesting to see where the "streams cross" in painting.  The streams cross a lot more in contemporary painting than one might think.





















                                                                        Jon Redmond

In rereading and organizing the notes I took in the workshop I attended with Jon Redmond I saw a lot of streams crossing with Noel. You can also see more of Redmond's work here. I noticed how similar much of his approach was in many ways to the process and notes I took in classes with Scott Noel. Redmond is also good friends with Alex Kanevsky and I did take a class with Kanvesky at PAFA, but I got a lot from Redmond's workshop on how I feel they both approach painting  as I think there is a very similar process at work in both of their paintings; specifically not letting the drawing control the painting, and working in and out of the positive and negative. Even in Scott's classes he would jump on me to stop drawing and start painting.

                                                                          Redmond
Here are some notes that I took down during a workshop with John Redmond last year as he did a demo over two days. Redmond was painting on mylar and used a little liquin and no terps after starting the painting.

                                                                         Redmond

The larger the color shape in the painting is, the more important it is. In the start of the painting push the color in your painting where you want it to go but nothing too specific. You are either painting light or painting shadow, let the layers peak through and paint in different directions. Try and capture the sensation of a color and paint the impression of deep space. Remember that the opacity of a shadow is different than that of light.  Use the "non-thing" to describe "the thing". 

By shifting the emphasis between the positive and negative back and forth it creates a better balance in the painting. Don't let the drawing control the painting. Build by masses of color, but no drawing. 

Let the outside control the inside, negative space to control positive space. Work by matching the relationships of value and let the "identity" of the object take care of itself as you build through masses, let the edges work themselves out--painting is not about creating symbols, edges happen as a result of what you see. 

Painting is a process of marks that are trying to tell you what the light is telling you, not what the object is telling you.

Paint what your eyes are telling you--light is the vehicle. We are trying to get paint to mimic the way light works. Build through value, not through color. Build through warm vs cool and be willing to destroy what you have done and repaint it. Let something complex be suggested through something simplistic. 

At the end fluctuate the edges, by making the highlights thicker it adds extra value as it sticks up off the surface to catch the light. You can also glaze or velatora to modify the painting with transparencies at the end.

Lay your colors out the same every time and compare your colors on the palette directly to the colors you see.

Now there are many many painters who work Open Form, and in the contemporary world it is probably the most common approach or "way" to paint. Zhaoming Wu, one of  my favortite painters works this way in both paint and charcoal as do Jeremy Mann, Carolynn Anderson as examples.

                                                                    Carolyn Anderson

 

Zhaoming Wu

 Jeremy Mann

It was hard for me to employ this idea to not let drawing control the painting as drawing is my foundation and very important to me, if I don't like the drawing I don't like the painting. Some painters I love like Dean Cornwell is all about the drawing in his painting.

When I work from the figure that was even more important to me, especially in the beginning. In school it took me making a lot of messed up paintings to finally be able to let the drawing go and get it back, to loose it and find it. You have to be willing to trust yourself to get the drawing back in. Noel always said I drew good enough to save anything I messed up--oh yeah--sure--it's so easy!

Redmond said he even messed up something on purpose at times to have something to save in the painting. An interesting strategy for sure, but only for the brave painter. I suppose this is akin to Noel painting and then scraping it down at the end of the day.

In the end there is no right or wrong way, just what works for you, what feels correct or right to you. Of course in school you have one teacher or critic saying YES to the very thing the next painter or critic says NO to. Its up to you to paint how you feel, not how anyone else does, even if your respect them or that process is the favored way to work in a system like a school.

What I took from the painters I studied from are approaches or motifs to work from or with, ideas to think about as I paint, and this is a very intellectual way to approach painting that above all involves risk for all of the painters I mention in this post. It is vital, big part of their process.

To me there is a lot of commonality to the paint language or paint thinking of Noel, Kanevsky, Redmond, Van Dyck going back to root artists like Edwin Dickinson. They probably would take issue with me saying this  as sometimes painters can feel they have cut out a very different ground than someone else. I think its good to celebrate and study the similarities of artists you like more than the differences as I think this helps you discover yourself and the common thread of your likes, loves and motivations as a painter.

Some Thoughts On Painting Part 3: Painting To Serve Your Aspirations

It's been a month now that school has been over and I turned my key into my studio a week ago and officially moved all of my school studio supplies and paintings home, there has been a lot of sorting and dumping going on both physically and mentally. I've sold some older paintings via Facebook ( and will offer more in another studio fire sale) and have a big pile to either paint over to reuse or to trash. I've hired a friend to help me slog through all of the "guts" of my school years at PAFA.

While I have been doing the physical sorting I have also been doing a lot of mental sorting as well and reviewing some of my old notes from classes and lectures from the past six years. I did chronicle a massive amount of my student time at PAFA as this blog clearly shows. I've posted demos and pictures covering a lot of my process visually, butI haven't yet really written as much about the mental aspects or the "Paint Thinking" as I like to call it.

Part of the reason may be that for me a lot of the thinking is actually the doing of 'it", the moment of response as a painter to the stimuli. In that instant of looking, feeling and response there is a universe churning in my head--then BAM! You make a stroke, mark, passage, scrape, wipe, or many a tiny little tap or wipe the last mark or stroke out.

One of the things I noticed about watching experienced painters work, is that they looked at the subject they were painting or drawing, if working from life, at least 60-70% of the time they were engaged in that session and actually making marks or strokes about 30% or so of the time. I have read that Sargent spent a long time looking very intently, and then striking with his brush. Sometimes he would then go a wipe it right off again, and repeaedt this way of working.

The best demonstration of this I have seen was watching Nelson Shanks paint four times in the past few years. Shanks is a painter of grand, traditional gifts and the head of Studio Incamminati here in Philly. He is very much about the classical approach to painting and Sargent's way of working and subject matter. Every year or so Shanks would do a painting demo to promote the school or some activity related to the school and it was really a great opportunity to learn about painting as a process by watching somebody as good as Shanks paint. I like his demos more than his finished pieces as they really have guts, life and energy in them that his more finished pieces loose. Watching Shanks is like watching a top athlete you can marvel at, someone at the top of their game work or play. Unlike the NBA though, you don't have to be 7 feet tall to be a great painter. You can see Shanks painting my friend Alina here on a youtube video. I warn you the music is bad and distracting---why they have to use such cheesey music is beyond me. This isn't his best demo, as I think he was feeling ill, but it does show his process well even though it's speeded up.

My point is talking about this all is that there is a lot of "paint thinking" going on by Shanks in such a demo. Certainly the pressure to complete and also to perform are big factors and conditions on this type of demo and his thought process. An experience painter like Shanks has lot of time in "thinking" this way, I imagine there is almost a groove in his mind, worn into his Neural Pathways as a result, like an athlete who is supremely trained to move so precisely between choice and instinct.

 Two paintings by Scott Noel that use the construction of the Convention Center in Philly as a subject, energy or element of a painting. Scott painted these as the construction was happening and so the energy of the painting was always live as the subject was alive and changing minute by minute as the construction site changed and "breathed" just as the models do in the process shot of the second painting.

This relates to another set of notes on my iphone from a painting seminar (maybe from Scott Noel) I took down and reconstruct here:

What are the connections to be discovered between a classroom painting and a studio painting? Do these different types of paintings, done under different conditions, different desires or needs inform each other and if so, how do they inform each other? What is the energy about in the work?

What are the crucial energies in the paintings and how do these energies manifest themselves in a mature painter and a mature work? Are there certain patterns that come together, passion, intellect, strategies employed , conscious motives? What is the aspiration of the painting and the painters and how does one construct the the best self that is a unification of all of this energy and motives as a painter?

Whoa, pretty heady stuff...

An answer to the first question for me was that the classroom painting was never a painting I would have chosen to do on my own. The conditions of that painting were set up by the teacher as a way to stress and practice ideas that the instructor wanted to teach. Some days I'd look at the set-up and go ugh! I'm sure that was at times a big failing on my part.

I always felt frustrated when doing the class paintings, even the ones that worked better than others. So my aspiration was to try and learn the lesson or "paint thinking", to take with me and apply the ideas of the lesson later, better. I suppose a mature painter does this and uses any opportunity to manifest their motives as a painter with any subject. In my final year in my undergrad and in my painting seminar in the master with Scott I did attempt to turn the classroom painting into something more that doing the art school equivalent of doing curls or military presses. It's also very easy to get your strategy confused, your paint thinking confused or unfocused and end with a mess of a painting!


 

















 These two paintings were done a year apart at school. The first was done in the last semester of my undergrad year in my class with Peter Van Dyck. I painted on this over the course of a few weeks. The second painting is a one session painting in my MFA Painting Seminar class with Scott Noel. Scott mostly had one session poses in that class so my strategy or Paint Thinking was different  from the start.  What I was able to do in both was find the energy or idea I wanted to paint right away, and try and make that work for me. The conditions of both painting were very different and thus my thinking had to take that into account to satisfy my motives. What was similar for my approach to in both paintings was taking the time to find the painting I wanted to paint. To make those set-ups work for me. I had 90 minutes for the second  painting and maybe 5-6 hours for the first painting. I actually had even less than 90 minutes for the second painting as the "light event" lasted only 20 minutes. This was a growth point for me in my last year of my undergrad how I made a painting in terms of  my "Paint Thinking".
 
From that point forward I did try and turn any opportunity to paint of draw into an opportunity the employ my energy and aspiration, motive as a painter. I don't always succeed in making a good painting or one I am happy with, but then no painter does that.

                                                                         Diebenkorn

                                                                               Sargent

This makes a Sargent a Sargent and not a Diebenkorn or a Shanks. I suppose a mature painter is able to move back and forth between the studio and the classroom or demo or whatever the impetus is for the subject to paint and connect his or her painting energies and strategies in a way the serves their aspirations for the particular painting as well as their own as a painter.

Some Thoughts On Painting Part 2

In my last post I talked a bit about the Perceptual Painting Process or theory of it's principles as I came to understand it in relation to my own process as a painter while in school at PAFA, and specifically working with teachers like Scott Noel, but also Peter Van Dyck who also would fall under the same "school" as a painter.

 Here are a few more notes on painting from Scott in one of my last master's painting Seminars I had with him:

"Slosh and cut with paint with very little rendering, wet into wet. Pay attention to the scale and location of what you are painting as well as the precision of your stroke and the opacity of your paint. Paint on a surface prepared with cremnitz white, which will give you a unique quality to the way your paint behaves. No glazing or underpainting, build with blocks of broad color. The paint is most beautiful when it is not cut with medium. Paintings with scale and complexity are exciting. In the end it comes down to what you really value as a painter, it shows in your work." Scott Noel

The medium Scott said he uses is a 1to-1to-1 of Gum terps, Stand Oil and regular terps. Mix it so it has the feeling of honey.

Two life paintings by Scott Noel

I think Scott has had a huge influence on both Peter and his wife Carolyn Pyfrom who also teaches at PAFA and I have both of them as teachers in the Certificate Program. Peter and Carolyn both attended the Florence Academy, The Florence Academy which was founded and run by Daniel Graves is a school who's curriculum is probably even more like the traditional cannon of the 19th century, much more focused that PAFA, which while embracing the past does embrace the present and modernism. I had Carolyn only once as a teacher in my first year in the Certificate program at PAFA but I had Peter a few times as a teacher, first in Animal Drawing and then Life Painting, but the class I where learned the most from him was his Painting Interiors class.  I did a post on taking that class with Peter here.

I this class I got to see Peter paint and demonstrate the Perceptual Painting process live and then apply that philosophy in my own paintings. I guess what I want to state here is that for while I did learn a lot from my teachers I am not a follower 100% of any one teacher, category, philosophy or school. I can't bow under one flag or one way of working or thinking, but try and take in these sometimes divergent ideas and let them cook down through me. That said I did learn a tone from Scott and Peter and Vincent Desiderio, who I will talk about in a future post.

Some ideas will strike you so boldly as a painter, like a lighting bolt illuminating your darkness tossed Zues-like from the hand of your teacher, it will strike and brand your mind and stay, and some will not. Some ideas from teachers will just fade out, not fit in with your personality or taste.

Buddhist master Lin Chi is supposed to have said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” I think this is true, at some point you must break from any system of teaching and any teacher or you risk making it a fetish or worse a dogma and a poor imitation of another artist's work. It is very tempting, especially for the young artist to fall under the spell of a strong and dogmatic teacher. They offer you all the solutions its seems to all your problems. This actually is what I think happens and works for most painters, especially what we snobs call the Sunday Painter or hobbyists, which frankly is the bulk of people painting in the world today.

It's so seductive to follow a guru, as the worry and struggle and fight is gone, you can worship at one alter and all the answers are given. But "Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!" I think that leads to being brittle and inflexible and that is death as an artist. Struggle is life! Struggle is essential, But it is not all.

While I do have some very deep core beliefs, such as drawing is the foundations of art for me, the foundation of thinking and analyzing and painting, I'm don't think you must draw only in one way and never have to follow any teacher 100%.

In that PP category I would list painters like Lennart Anderson, Isreal Bershberg, George Nick, Stuart Shills, Caroyln Pyfrom, Philip Geiger and maybe the king of them all, Antonio López García. For so many painters he is the top of the top in the Perceptual Painting world. I do like his work a lot, but I don't fall under the romance of his struggle which I think many painters do. That can be a false way as well. A trap that you can fall in and think as a real "arrrteest" it must be all hand-nailed-to-the-forehead and never a joy of real gains and performance from practice and hard work. So many holes you can step in as an artist.

                                                            Spring Fed, Andrew Wyeth

                                                    Sink and Mirror, Antonio López García

I think López García's work is very similar to the work of one of my biggest influences and painting gods, Andrew Wyeth. That statement alone would condemn me in many circles, I can hear the brushes breaking and teeth clenching now. To me both artists are more similar in temperament and subject than they are different. They both create a paint-space of powerful melancholy and memory.  A loving, deeply personal paint space about the worlds they live in, Garcia, Spain and Wyeth, the Brandywine. I think their work both inhabits an intense specific atmosphere, of a specific place, of a time, of their cities, homes and friends as intimate as a lovers hand caressing in the small of your back.

 There is an honesty I feel that makes them kin as artists. But the fact is one painter's honesty is in some circles is another's stage craft. This happened a lot more in the Masters Program than he undergrad, but it did happen at time there too--sometimes I feel I had to just pull away an disengage from that mentality and business as it was a dog chasing it's tail, and a waste of energy.

 
Under the general category of what I call  or think of as "realism" there are many different movements that are all like "kissing Cousins" to me, you have the Novo-realists like Jeremy Lipking, Alexy Steel, Tony Pro and a few others. These guys tend to hang out as a group much like the Ashcan School did so while its not an official movement there are a many artists who share a similar desire to paint a certain kind of truth.  See the world in a similar way as painters, At the Art Renewal Center you have another group of artists sharing a similar aesthetic. What I don't get is other than jealousy, why do one group have to hate on another? I think all of these movements have more in common than not and most all of them trace their love and art gods back to the same pantheon of great painters of the past.

And then there are realists like Vincent Desiderio and Alex Kanevsky, both of whom build paintings up out of concepts or ideas and both of whom often use photography as part of the process for generating their images. I don't see them as being officially part of any sub movement of realism per se, or I have never heard them claim an allegiance. Maybe this is imporant and why they are at the top of the painting world right now, they are not trying to play with a certain group or camp. I guess my thinking on this is that you can get caught up in this gamesmanship and waste energy that you could apply painting and waste negative energy on other artists that return you nothing.

Some Thoughts On Painting Part 1: Perceptual Painting

The last few days as I move through the piles of books, paintings, supplies and more that I have brought home from school and started to sort out things to keep and toss I have come across some notes on the process of painting from a few teachers and workshops I have taken. This post will touch on my experience and learning about the approach or way of painting, movement if you will, that is called Perceptual Painting.

These notes from Scott Noel's class are not technical per se, not how to mix up a color for flesh tone, mix strings of color in a system or how to paint fur, but are ideas on how to approach painting in a bigger sense, and make moves as a painter that might keep your process fresh from beginning to the end instead of following a specific recipe. It wasn't easy for me to grasp this idea of perceptual painting as much went against my nature at the time as a painter.

Here are some notes from one of my last classes with Scott Noel that I jotted down on my iphone:

"Great paintings are as clear as the stripes on a flag. Paint with big shapes of color and compress the darks and the lights, less of a sharp contrast between them. This makes the shadows richer in color. Paint with a sense of the thing coming into view in color before you can name what it is."--Scott Noel

It took me a long time to get what Scott was talking about in the classes I took with him. I would sometimes get pretty frustrated in trying to interpret what he was saying in his language into a way of thinking I could use in my painting language. My tool kit. Paint the color not the thing. I was very object oriented when I started as a painter.

                                                          A painting by Scott Noel

I come from a very techie approach to things as an artist, it was the way I learned being self taught until I went back to school and I am still a very techie artist in many ways. Scott would never use the typical or well know technical terms like cast shadow, form shadow, etc., he just never talked like the typical painting teacher or instructor you had in school or would see in an instructional video. Like Dickinson, Scott avoided in class talking about any systems of painting ( though one could say that a non-system is a system if it leads to consistent results, i.e., successful paintings). HA!

Scot's core, spirit and gusto as a painter lived on the razors edge between structure and failure. Paint all day and then scrape it down. If it comes too easy, take it out and redo it. It was a real philosophical approach to painting that does come out of the Edwin Dickinson approach to painting. A way of seeing the world as paint or as Dickinson stated, a work of art as being something that 'moved the spirit through the eye.' Scott built up structures of paint that he then was always willing to tare down to restate. Nothing was precious or was safe from change, and that is a way of working that is very different from some painters who move, step-by-step completing a painting in clear stages or movements. Its dangerous and take huge amounts of energy to work this way.

                                                      Edwin Dickinson, Frances Foley

Over the years I had Scott as a teacher I grew enough that I eventually got what Scott was talking about and how it related to his process as a painter and also where we related and differed in our approaches, likes and appetites as painters. We would never agree on some artists such as many of the Russian painters like Fechin or Rockwell, both are fantastic painters and heroes and inspirations to me.

Often in class Scott would look at my work and say that the color needed to be more evocative. I'd look at the painting and feel that I had really matched the colors and get kind of frustrated. "Evocative? What the hell does that mean?" I'd really push back at him with questions as to what did he mean by that, really try and nail him down, and he'd be elusive with a specific technical answer. AARRRG!

But one day in a Sunday painting session I painted a wall behind the model in what I would call an emotionally keyed color that didn't literally look like what I saw with my eye, but my artists eye and Scott was all Henry Higgins , "Eureka! You've got it!" Now I'm not saying this paintig or the next one are great paintings, but they were breakthroughs in understanding and thinking as a painter for me and getting what Scott had been trying to get me to "see" as a painter. You are not limited by what you see exactly, you have a lot more options as a painter and ways of seeing.

Your perception of a scene as a painter isn't always going to be a literal interpretation of what you see and I did that a lot more early on as a student. You may, can, should, must perceive the envelope of color as emotionally different from what you see before you. That tosses you into another realm of painting, a very personal realm. From there I understood what Scott had been challenging me with for a long time. You see this very distinctly in the work of Sickert, Bonnard and even Sargent or Wyeth. Scott always had books by Degas, Sickert and Bonnard in class as examples.

                                                           Bather by Pierre Bonnard

                                                      Le Lit de Cuivre by Walter Sickert

                                               The Iron Bedstead by Walter Sickert


It came down to not always painting what the color really looked like but how the color "felt", and this meant that things were not about matching what I was literally seeing color wise but about what I would call "poetic color". How did I "feel" the color I was seeing and matching with paint how I "felt the color." That would mean by extension how do I see the whole painting in that way, in non-literal- poetic field of colors, stated boldly like stripes on a flag, distinct and clear. Edwin Dickinson is maybe the greatest example of this way of thinking, feeling and seeing as a painter which has come to be called the Perceptual Painting approach. There are a lot of great painters working in this way that you can read more about over on the Perceptual Painters FB page  and the great Painting Perceptions website. The core of this approach to painting runs deep in the pool of Philadelphia painters especially because of PAFA and because of Scott. This way of thinking as a painter is at the core of his approach as one of big guns and chief teacher and leader of the Perceptual Painters movement or approach.

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Here is a shot I took of Scott working along the students in one of the Sunday sessions and you can see here the model, the room and how Scott is interpreting the scene. Its not a literal mimetic reproduction of what lies before him. I am not trying cast shade or judgement on any one approach being better or more correct in art or painting, but to cast some insights  and ways of thinking as a painter I have learned from studying under the best painting teacher I studied under and certainly one of the best painting teachers today. I don't know if I would call myself a perceptual painter but I do feel a deep kinship and attraction and do employ that way of thinking as a painter.

Moving On

This week was the real official end to my time at PAFA. The ASE came down and Tuesday all of us students who exhibited in the show had to come in and pic-up any work that didn't sell and Wednesday was the last day to clean out your studio and turn in your key. Saturday I moved home all of my furniture, easels and bookshelves, etc., with the help of my buddy Will, so I only had to grab a few things to grab in the studio and some trash to toss.

                                                    My ASE wall looks so bare now...

 

In the basement gallery 128 you can see the work that did sell getting ready for the buyers, including some of my work on top of the table

I drove in early and grabbed my paintings that were left in the museum and put them in my car, and then painted my studio and took the last few little things left and turned in my key. I sold over half of my wall and that's great, I can use the $$ as soon the student debt will come calling, and I want to fix up things in the home studio.

I painted my studio pretty quick as I didn't really mark the walls up at all except for some pushpin holes. The last click of my now former studio door closing officially marked the end of my time at PAFA, and it felt great!!! I gave my rollers to a few fellow MFA's who were also in for the final day.

                        A great picture of Scott Noel and me that my Dad shot at graduation, I hope Scott has  a great sabatical, he really deserves it!


I know I will be returning to PAFA in a new capacity in the future, but for now my time as a student is officially done. I feel like the Alice Cooper  Schools Out song at the moment, and I know the next few days will be working on the strip and catching a breath before I turn my full attention to the next phase of my career and life, trying to move full time into the fine art world.

The focus of this blog will now change as well from being a student to blogging about getting more galleries, entering more competitions, etc. I'll be heading out to Arizona in a few weeks and doing the Scottsdale run at the galleries out there. Right now I am going to be making a master list of galleries I am aiming at, contact info etc.

Final Semester: 5 weeks to go!

Like a sequence in an old movie where the pages of a calender fly off with the racing days I am now down to only five weeks left in the MFA. last week was my final critique with Martha Armstrong, one of my two visiting critics as well as one of my last crits with Scott Noel. Martha and I have had some very interesting conversations and she has been one of the most insightful of the critics I have had in my entire time at PAFA.  I wish I had more time with here as its hard to cram so much into just 30 minutes 3 times a semester. She did push me to try and make the current subject I am painting  my own as it were. What am I really trying to say and go for? Why this subject, to really dig down into it. Like Scott, she wants to know what I am really after as a painter, or as Scott bluntly puts it--whats at stake for me as an artist? Is it journalistic, or a chronicle of space in some way? Just facile paintings of the urban is not enough.

I like a lot of types of art and artists, that is in my case something that I also do, comics, storyboards, illustration and landscape painting etc. This is fairly unique in many ways and certainly at a school most students never do this wide a variety of work. So because of this at times Scott has asked me what am I most interested in as a painter because he sees many things going on in my work and my technical skill he feels can trap me in a way.  He's always very complimentary about my tech level, skill level, but he feels that can trap you as a painter from getting down to the core of what a work is about. But this last group of paintings he doesn't feel that way about, he really likes them--and from Scott that is pretty high praise as they are based on photos. I think with the series of landscapes that I started last semester and mostly in acrylic I am exploring the urban landscape as a specific space of memory has clicked. The best example is one of the latest paintings I completed, Snowy Field.

 

Here is the description of the painting I did for my seminar class:

 Snowy Field, (18 x 24 Oil ) This skirmish in paint is the latest work in my series of urban landscapes that I have been obsessed with for the past five to six years. There is something about the light striking these open areas in West Philadelphia along the train ride in and out of the city that reach out and grab me. I try and capture these moments of passing in paint in a dash and yet they are a somewhat journalistic fashion, as I want to report about these places in paint, but not obsess about all the details, just the facts of how they make me feel.

These settings which pass my view at 35 to 40 miles an hours go by in 5-7 seconds on the train, yet they grab me more that the new urban graffiti murals that are filling up the walls of the homes and buildings along Market Street in the past few years, like an ivy that is spreading from house to house.

When I saw this scene as the train slowed into the station, I knew I had to paint it, to try and capture it as a distinct location, as distinct as the face of a sleeping relative. This painting depicts a snow covered field at Market and 48th street along the Market/Frankford El line just after the storm clouds move off to the east. I have painted this spot before, in late summer, but its character in winter was just as enticing a subject. There is something magically alluring to me about these open, abandoned and melancholy plots of land.

The parking lot with its cracked and patchwork fixes, an overgrown field like an unkempt head of hair, spaces between places, or links between houses and streets demand more of me to paint than a Brandywine field. These spaces are as powerful as any beautiful bucolic landscape to me, the way they push back the houses or cut between them in odd shapes or spots. Under the pristine snow, the crystal clean frosting, are a few bones and tufts left that poke through like a skeletal remain of a previous inhabitant. What was the story here? Like an old grave site in a way of some other time, it races me back to my old neighborhood in Detroit which fell into the blight of urban decay from the riots of the 60’s. This field reminds me of the big open field across the street from my old home, and along the back of that field was a train track, about the same distance  away as the row of houses in this painting, so in a way this painting is like a mirror image reflecting from my present to my past.

I’m hearing an old song playing on a new radio, the beat is a poetic sense of space and light, my challenge is to try and play along, get this riff down in paint as fast as I can to keep the feeling fresh and alive. I want to paint the smell of the air, the feel of light in pigment. How can I do that? I don’t know, it seems impossible, but I must try and there is no exact formula, so I just paint until I can smell it and  taste it. Most of the paintings I do like this one are done in one session, a ''premier- coup,” keeping only the essential details needed to create the mood and poetic space I want to capture.

So this I think gives you an idea of what I am going for now and trying to lay stake to in these recent paintings.

                                            Blue Shadow, 114 x 17 Acrylic on heavy paper

We have graduation rehearsal on Monday and I'll be cleaning out the last of the Star Wars work so I can really finish my thesis and have a few weeks of really just painting away for my ASE Wall.

PAFA MFA 2 Fall Week 3: Go For Throttle Up!

 Things kicked in full this week with bring in work for our first assignments in Mike Gallagher's Drawing Seminar and discussing our readings in Tom Csaszar's seminar. I also got a bit of a cold which seems to happen within the first month each fall. This time the cold is annoying and not as bad as previous years but the sudden heat wave this week didn't make that feel any better. Especially when I had to run down to PAFA from teaching my storyboard class at Uarts for a meeting on the thesis only to arrive just as it was ending! Aggh! I know this will happen a lot this year, everything happens on the same days and same times. This week we reviewed the first weeks assignmnets in the Storybaord class which was to make an animatic about going to work. There were some entertaining little rough films and a few failures, but I think it was a good learning experience and next week I have the feeling that the animatics will be much stronger.

At PAFA I had my first studio meeting with the new MFA head Clint Jukkala and studio crit with Scott Noel. Clint has been going around to see each artists work in their studio and to get to know us better and our work. I've had the longest relationship with Scott of any teacher at the school besides Mike Gallagher,  Scott and I have had a lot of great times together and is certainly the teacher I have learned the most from in the undergrad through to my MFA years, he's also my MFA Thesis reader. We can lock horns but in a great way and rib each other too---which is great.

It's funny as we still debate the same things so often and disagree on many of the same points for almost 6 years now, each trying to convince the other, move the other to change their minds on certain aspects of painting. Scott just doesn't love any painting that involves photography( though Degas gets a pass). So for him anytime I have any "camera conditioned art", work from my own photos, he's always more stick than carrott, thus any artist who uses photography never can win for him. Except for Degas. I know he feels invested in me as student  and tells me this, we share many of the same issues as painters, however we sceperate at the paths of photography and illustration. He's pushing me a lot harder in the MFA than in the undergrad because he feels for me this is how my work will be challenged as a painter when I leave school. I agree on some levels and not in another. I think the orbit I seek to enter might now be the same orbit of artists like John Currin. I think I could be happy and successful being in a southwestern gallery or maybe a gallery similar to John Pence or Arcadia in NYC.  I'm a figurative and narrative painter, and I like that and want to be stronger and better, and know I do not seek to be a modernist abstract painter.

The photography thing frankly I think is silly, great work can be done with the aid of photos and a lot of bad art done from life.  Scott loves my plein air work better than anything else I do with the use of photography, and I had Scott's crit and my meeting with Clint  the same day, back to back, and they both liked the two different aspects of my work but the opposite of what the other liked. Clint wasn't interested in the plein air, but liked this painting, the Climax of Play, in which I employed photos I took. Scott didn't like this painting so much because I think more of an aesthetic preference or prejudice because of the photos, but loved the plein air paintings I did this summer. There are different issues at stake in both types of work, different approaches to making an image and even different ways of handling paint--- but there are also similarities as well--and the plein air work definitely informs the studio work and work I do using the camera as a source. Clint felt that Climax was much more contemporary, which is probably the thing that maybe Scott didn't like about it. A lot of contemporary painters use photography from Desiderio to Kanevsky at school to Justin Mortimer and Daniel Pitin, who's work I just discovered. However there are paintings I did that Scott liked which he though were from life that were not--so I got him! But keep that between us, OK?

Sometimes getting different "likes," even  opposite feedback can be confusing as a painter. You scratch you head trying to resolve all the feedback. I think its harder when its from people you really like and respect. If you don't like the critics work, or even personality I think it's easier to just dump it off. I feel photos or not its all a whole to me, all connected. This is the mash-up of the critic based program, because you can get very opposite views on your work, find it a bit confusing and maybe for a younger artist dispiriting, but in the end it's about me, not them. It can take a bit of thinking and reflection and searching after a critique to see  if there are common cords, ideas, approaches or issues or sometimes just really an overriding personal preference or prejudice behind the critics views and opinions. Sometimes just being figurative, or painting a female figure is enough for some critics to dismiss or knock the work. Sometimes in the end of the crit you can just say, well, I don't agree? I remember Vincent Desiderio telling me that if something the critic says just doesn't stick, ring true or isn't useful--just toss it out.

In my Aesthetics and Criticism seminar with Tom Csaszar we had a class discussion of last weeks readings on the Aesthetics of Appearing by Martin Seel and a review of the work of Jennifer Bartlett's by Klaus Ottman.
 
                                                 Details from Bartlett's paintings

The PAFA Museum is currently hosting a retrospective of Bartlett's work. One of the great benefits of having a school which also has a great museum--it is being able to go down in class and actually talk about the work in front of the work.

Now I have to admit right off the bat I am not a huge fan of Bartlett's work.  It doesn't grab me, and while some of the ideas like using the grid might sound interesting, in the end I want to be grabbed by the work, not the concept. If a concept sounds great on paper, fine, but the art has to grab me more than the idea.  This is my constant issue with mimetic work vs non-retinal work.
 

 The review by Ottman talked about her drawing chops, her painting chops, her ability to go from very abstract to very realistic work. Yes, she does cover that gamut, but her realistic chops are just weak, her paint handling is never as rewarding up close. And way too often I think in the modernists eyes any even half-way decent drawing- or heck any scribble in the process of making art is seen as being as good as a drawing by a great draughtsman. And I say hell no it isn't! Try and sell that weak-assed soup on the street and see how long you stay in business. The series of pool paintings are maybe the best of her realistic work, but fall far short of many great contemporary painters like the late Andrew Wyeth, or even current artist like Antonio Lopez or Vincent Desiderio for real feelings of melancholy. Or a host a finely talented female painters like these great woman painters! There is no reason for the scale in my mind and no bravura paint handling. Its clumsy painting and no better and any average first year student.  The strokes  or paint handling and techniques are flat and monotonous and the paint sinks into the canvas with a great dullness. I feel they get "In" and are accepted because people like her more conceptual abstract work. I think if she just did these paintings alone she would not be getting any hoopla or be as respected. Just my opinion, your mileage may vary

                                       Tom and the class in the museum discussing the work

For me the habitual use of the grid on some of the pieces like this which I think is on loan from the MET seem like an afterthought and don't really seem to mesh with the rest of the piece well. Where I think it does work is pieces like Amagansett Dyptch #1 which is rich and has a woven, tapestry feeling to the work. It was interesting to discuss the work nonetheless and get others feelings about the work in front of the work. We also discussed how the show was hung, curated and if we agreed with how it was arranged, what we as curators might do differently. In the end for me I think she is much more successful as a drawer than an painter, the drawings have a reward and richness  that makes you think of artist from Degas to Georges Seurat but still leave me pretty neutral to the work in the end.

Amagansett Diptych #1where its more organic, almost woven like a tapestry. These works do two important things for me as an artist, they give me an exrience when  stand back, and another when I am up close. I like some of the drawings the best

 In Mike Gallagher's class we had our class crit of our first assignments which was to use oblique strategies to introduce the conditions of failure and chance into our creative process that came from last week's class and a film on Brian Eno. Eno employs a huge list of strategies in his creative process when he gets stuck. Some of the ideas I used in my piece are:

Trust in the you of now
Turn it upside down
What mistakes did you make last time?
Abandon normal instruments
Change instrument roles
 Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do



I started by clipping newspapers and using matte medium to put them down of illustration board that I had covered with 2 coats of gesso. Then using a China marker I made some random marks using a straight edge. Working from a photos I shot of the old abandoned houses I have been working with since last year I massed in big shapes. I decide to work with acrylics as well, something I really haven't work wed too much. I turned the canvas the whole time. letting this slide and drip, using what was on the newspaper as sort of a drawing, or ignoring it, covering it it. I used chance in how I worked and if something failed or I didn't like it I had to decide to keep it or not. Paint, turn, paint, turn, drip, smush, etc. Then I decided to add a figure in, again working from a photo I shot.

To me the thing is trying to find a way to employ these ideas that work in an organic way, not just making a drawing for class. I did something very similar last year in Michael Moore's drawing class where we had to make a drawing employing a list of criteria or instructions we were given.  I also used my fingers and a toothbrush a lot on this painting and tried to have fun as well. We so often forget fun or disregard it.


 

You can see the work in three stages, I did leave it over night and come back and finish it the next day. I was happy with the way some things happened here. The idea of employing failure or the chance of failure is something I think I do all of the time as a natural part of my process. You always risk failure, one stroke yes! the next--no!!!

I often wipe out work and restart, restate,  and you do have the chance of happy accidents as a painter depending on your process. I my commercial work, well you can't have chance on a deadline or certainly not failure. Often I have to change up strategies in my mind and work in a single day, change my cartoonist hat to my painters beret or vise versa. I suppose maybe because of this I am used to having to really flex different methodologies. I didn't get the work reviewed this week because the class is fairly large and the crits for each person's piece was fairly long, so I'll get my class crit next week.  The best thing about nest week is that Ann Gale is coming to the school, so a lot of people like  me a really pumped for that!

PAFA MFA 2 Fall Week 2: First Full Week and First Friday

This was the first full week for me of the Fall semester and it was full, full! I had all of my seminars at school and my first Storyboard class that I teach at Uarts. It was also the first First Friday of the school year so it was a busy time in the old town last night with all of the galleries open and a lot of shows full of the swirls of teachers, students, friends, foes, critics and more racing cross town gallery to gallery, openings all over Center City and Old City. It was also just one of the most gorgeous days of the year and the first day that really felt like Fall and everybody was in high spirits and a good mood.
 

                                      PAFA students sunning themselves like lizards--or Ultraman


The incoming class at Uarts seems like a good one, we had a good first day and the atmosphere was very jovial and the energy was good. I look forward to seeing the results of the first assignment which tells me a lot about who, what and where each student is on their path to being a pro artist. Each year the school moves to include more and more digital requirements from the teacher and students, I have to post a lot of material on-line. This is one of the biggest differences between PAFA and Uarts. I get very little communication or class resources on-line at PAFA, but as a teacher at Uarts I have to do quite a bit to the students through the Digication portal. I even started a blog for my class this year to post assignments, resources etc. There are still teachers at PAFA I can't email in 2013!

I also met the new head of the MFA Program Clint Jukkala this week and I will have a studio visit from him next week. Right away at the meeting with the MFA 2's he was asking for our comments and feedback and people were giving him some including me. He seemed open and receptive to what we had to say, some even wanted to get rid of grading altogether including Clint. I think he will have a lot of hard work to do on the program and maybe his biggest fight might not be with teachers or students but maybe the board of directors of the school. I could be wrong but that's my guess. There are a lot of things that need to be improved and that will require a great deal of $$$$$ and maybe some radical surgery. I hope they can do these things as the schools standing  and so many things important to the education outcome would greatly improve, at the same time I don't feel the school should try to be YALE, it should try to be PAFA. It was the first art school and IMHO should still be if not the best, in the top 10 in the world. Having been a student for a long while now and a teacher even longer and a professional more than twice as long as booth, I have very strong feelings on art eduction as a whole, the Industrial Education Complex as I call it.

I feel the system is nearly broken in many ways, especially because of the cost and the fact too many students graduate with a ratio of debt to skills that is spectacularly tragic. That translates into almost no hope to make a living as an artist for the bulk of students in school. Its not all on the school or the teachers, it is primarily the responsibility of the student to demand that they get the service ( skills and learning) they need to have the best chance to make a living as an artist, no matter what their discipline may be.

                                The gang and I beating it criss-cross the city arting we  go!


A group of my MFA buddies all gathered together to hit the galleries for First Friday, starting a Gross McCleaf and ending up at Rodger lapelle and then having some grub before we headed home with heads chock-full of art and soar feet. It's funny how you pass groups of students as we criss-cross galleries. There were some galleries that were just too crowded, so I'd peak in and pop out, or frankly just had work I didn't enjoy of find interesting. There was a lot of competent work,  but overall there wasn't a lot I found that tickled my fancy or gave me a charge. The work I think I found the most enjoyable were the work at Gross McCleaf by Ann Lofquist.

 

 Ann Lofquist

 

Christine Lafuente

I think she is one of the best landscape painters working today, the paint handling, the quality of light and atmosphere  she has in her work are fantastic. In a genere that is probably the most overpopulated with painters her landscape paintings really stand out and in with the best of the tonalists like Emil Carlson and Lanthrop. Gross McCleaf also represents the work of any of the faculty at PAFA like Scott Noel and Douglas Martenson but also many of the best regional painters in general. At Rodger LaPelle my buddy Bannister McKenzie was in a group show.

                                                                 Bannister McKenzie

                                                        Osborne's opening at Locks

The sunset and shadows were fantastic and cut great light and shapes across the city.

                                                                     Michael Gallagher

                                                                      In Schmidt-Dean

Over at Locks Gallery there was a big show of Liz Osborne's work and the show was so packed I just peaked in for a second. We visited the Schmidtdean Gallery that has work by one of my favorite teachers and people at PAFA Michael Gallagher. One of the owners Chrispopher was really nice and came out and took time talking to us about many of the artists in the gallery. There is definitely a hierarchy to the Center City galleries like Locks or Schmidt-Dean which feel much more Chelsea, very contemporary and modernist and the galleries in Old City like F.A.N and my gallery Rodger LaPelle, they feel more Soho. The best thing is that unlike NYC, the  Philly art walk is very walkable. Still by the end of the night, and a long day at school which included Mike Gallagher's class and a film on Brian Eno I was beat when I got home.  But it was great fun to hang with my fellow PAFites and enjoy art, laughs and eats, the art pyramid and a great way to really kick off the Fall semester.