Listening to the visual

I'm going on something of a computer fast (for a reason that I'll talk about later) till near the end of this month.... Feel free to leave me a note; I will answer eventually! I also have some new book news that I may be able to talk about soon.

I have a good many friends who are painters, and a number of them live in the space that looks as if it exists after photography and its transformations, after Modernism and its shocks; they participate in the return to figuration, narrative, and realism, but they aren't fully realist in the sense of someone like Jacob Collins or Juliette Aristides. I have an interest in the how and why of the return to realism among so many artists, especially since it parallels the return to meter and rhyme and forms in poetry. Lately I have looked at or listened to videos and podcasts about that resurgence; many of the video/audio pieces below fall into that category but not all. 

In poetry and fiction, we have a sense of the materials, the sound and sense of words--yes, we can be carried beyond the work in some way. We can be lost in sound or story for a time. But art in words is both guide dream and little black marks on the page or, read, aloud, "a mouthful of air"; as readers, we're busy translating and so are in two places at once. Paint can go very far, can become photo-realistic, can fool the eye. Where is the line, how much finish ought there to be, how much should the viewer be aware of the medium? Is some pleasure lost when we lose that sense of brushstrokes and layerings of paint? I suppose the contrast with writing is more the difference between limpidity and roughness or an aureate style.

I'm especially fond of the Suggested Donation series with Tony Curanaj and Ted Minoff, all with the recording engineering (and sometimes co-comments) of musician Jay Braun. I have not found one that is not an interesting listen. Great coming-of-age stories, great turning-of-the-wheel of art toward the future by harnessing tradition, metaphysical flourishes, practical discussion of skills. The psychology of art video is also intriguing.

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A short film by Alvaro Aro about Missouri artist Ali Cavanaugh. (Vimage Studios 2011.) Youtube. Watercolor on kaolin. People often ask me about how I have managed being a poet, novelist, and a mother of three--well, here's a modern-day painter of frescoes with a batch of lively children. Cavanaugh makes compromises, having to use fragments of time and also utilizing photographs of her models. (My version of this also involves bits of time. And concentration in what time I have.) The David Jon Kassan podcast also deals with this problem, as he took care of his son as a baby and has continued to be responsible for him. 

Burton Silverman. Suggested Donation. Episode 31. Ideas of the universal, painterly qualities to the work, self-indulgence in art, artists and family, curators and teachers who think arts started with Cezanne, work that is "halfway" between realism and Modernism, the illusion of self-expression as belonging to Modernism, annihilation of skills as important in Modernism, teachers' attempts to suppress his childhood skills, not becoming a slave to the past, transformation after WWI, declining roles of church and royalty, retrieval of the academic tradition, a type of cloying, retrogressive painting, "the more I know, the less I know," the importance of being unsure, the "itness" of things, etc. He talks about Modernism as exacerbating a feeling of public uncertainty--Modernism's paintings with a lack of story as bound to inhuman environments, corporate mentality, and inhuman environments, and more. Validation, patronage. Witnessing and recording history: illustrating seminal black protests in Alabama in the 60's. A little low in volume but well worth a listen.

Daniel Sprick. Suggested Donation. Episode 32. Daniel Sprick is widely considered one of the leading realist painters. His work is featured in numerous private and public collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock.

David Kassan (KAS-san). Suggested Donation. Episode15. "Falling down the stairs and landing on your feet." Skills and weight in painting. (I really like the podcasts that try to grapple with what it is that takes a painting beyond realism to something more--the heft or freight of life, the energy of life.) Lots of interesting talk about contemporary painters outside North America, including various Israeli painters and Antonio López García. Discussion of the difficulties of being the at-home parent and trying to paint.

Exploring the Psychology of Creativity, 2017. "What is creativity? Can we develop it, or is it innate? Watch the conversation between Marc Mayer, Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada, and Dr. Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, which took place March 9, 2017 at the National Gallery of Canada." Good conversation, in places closely related to Peterson's lectures on personality.

Suggested Donation: Jacob Collins. Podcast series. Episode 4. http://www.suggesteddonationpodcast.com/blog/2014/4/14/episode. Major figure in the return to realist art. Founder of the Water Street Atelier, Grand Central Academy, and Hudson River Fellowship. For more about Jacob Collins, see Adam Gopnik's "Life Studies" in the New Yorker. Clip from "Life Studies":  Jacob was always trying to strike a decent mean between affirmation of his secret faith that art had been going wrong since the eighteen-sixties and his desire not to get caught up in the reactionary grievance-keeping that disfigured much of the revivalist world he lived in. “You’ll outgrow wanting to draw the world as it is, searching for this beauty, this place where light and the body meet—that was the attitude of most of the art teachers I had,” he went on. “So I had to re-create a world in which I could do the kind of drawing I wanted to do. I wasn’t alone in this. There were quite a few of us trying, and, bit by bit, and book by book, and practice by practice, we tried to remake the world of atelier realism that had been discarded and abandoned.” Over time, he assembled a group of teachers and students and enthusiasts, all given over to the practice of classical drawing from life and plaster casts, and from that nucleus came this studio and then the Grand Central Academy.

Suggested Donation: Juliette Aristides. Podcast series. Episode 20. Instructor of Aristides Classical Atelier at the Gage Academy of Art. Lovely, literate, thoughtful discussion of life, beauty, skills, brokenness, what lasts, and the nature of a life of making art. This one is a real discussion, interesting back and forth, and Aristides is wonderfully able to form her thoughts in words. "Juliette Aristides is a monumental figure in the classical art community. Her . . . books on painting have been hugely influential to a generation of artists . . . ." Issues of investment of self in a time without proper response, the online world as a response to the debased environment, the classical atelier and the narrative arc of education, truth and art, art and the feeling that life matters, a context for work that lasts and has meaning, the ability to think and go deep (vs. online life), the personal encounter with paintings, art as backdrop for real life in earlier times, drawing as meditation and connection with life and self--as an antidote to the remoteness of current life with its online hours, physical beings needing physical connections to a physical world, etc.

Michael Klein. Suggested Donation, Episode 9. Interesting podcast with a painter from rural Minnesota who found his way to New York and Argentina. It reminds me a bit of Makoto Fujimura because he talks about being troubled by beauty and what it is for and resolves the issue some time after he becomes a Christian.

Odd Nerdrum: The Self-portrait. Nerdrum Pictures, 2015.

Odd Nerdrum. Time Water Recollection. Norwegian documentary, 1992. Strange and beautiful, with lots of images of Iceland and Nerdrum's home in Norway. The sub-titles end part-way through, but it's still wonderful to see.

Patricia Watwood, Part 1. Suggested Donation. Podcast series, Episode 3. "We talk about her solo show "Venus Apocalypse", education, influences and her perspective as a female artist."

Peter Trippi on Alma-Tadema. Suggested Donation, Episode 35. This year I saw the beautiful show at The Clark Institute he talks about at one point. His curated Alma-Tadema traveling show (in the Netherlands and Venice and London) sounds wonderful. 

Sharon Sprung. Suggested Donation. Episode 26. Great story about Sharon Sprung at 19 and Harvey Dinnerstein. She says Dinnerstein taught her what it meant to be an artist. A purist. "I'd never seen anybody so immersed in anything." Dan Green taught her skills. Quirky coming-of-age story, with lots of talk about older writers and a keen understanding of her own nature and particular demands. I'm still listening to this one... She's a character, quite stubborn and particular in her desires in how to work. And she's one of many examples of how an early death in the family forges a path in the arts. I find it fascinating that her mother threw away every image of her dead father to protect herself, and later Sharon Sprung became a maker of figurative images. Lots of good talk about teaching, too, and the importance of working from life. She's funny! A real character.

The Nerdrum School. Interview w/ Luke Hillestad (2013)

Two Autumns. London: BBC. I'm fond of Thomas Reidelsheimer's lovely Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, a great documentary about Goldsworthy in the landscape. If you like that one, try this! Filmed in Scotland and Japan. If hobbits were less satisfied with home and good cooking went on adventures more often, I'm sure they could produce a visual artist like Andy Goldsworthy.

Vincent Desiderio. Suggested Donation, Episode 6. This one is quite good, particularly if you have an interest in art history. Very curious to look at the trajectory of Desiderio's own work. "Vincent Desiderio is one of the leading figurative painters of our time. His work is featured in collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center among many others. He is a senior critic at the New York Academy of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Vincent has a reputation as one of the leading intellects in figurative art, and he did not disappoint. We are honored to have him join us on Suggested Donation, at the Salmangundi Club in New York City for a fascinating conversation about his work and his deep love for art history, film and philosophy."

Year in Review. Episode 13, Suggested Donations. 2014. Tony Curanaj and Ted Minoff and Jay Braun talk about the podcast. Close attention to one of Tony Curanaj's paintings.

Stems, shoots, and leaves--

The image is a large detail of Agnes II. The colors are much better in the original, so go see!

The Foliate Head

Last year I published a book called The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press) and another called Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing), both decked with foliate-head art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. So I can't resist linking to Eyes Big as Plates. Here are wonderful elder faces as foliated heads and elder bodies decked in leaves and seaweed and flowers and reeds by two collaborators, Ritta Ikonen of Finland and Karoline Hjorth of Norway.

These magical figures are descendants of folk culture and of Andy Goldsworthy in their out-of-doors, make-do-with-the-landscape beauty. The mythic quality that often accrues to Goldsworthy's pieces becomes dominant in these, as suggestions of narrative enters in, story and ceremony hovering like an ancient, rural halo over the heads of characters emerging from the natural world.

Yet where Goldsworthy often gives one the feeling that an infinitely precocious child has been celebrating and playing with the materials of the natural world in a timeless realm, these pieces make a contemporary art by going back through folk tradition and the past, and it seems exactly right that they focus a lens on the elderly, who are our living embodiment of the (more recent) past.

As with Goldworthy, the record of the art event involves a collision between two kinds of time, the quick instant of the photographic medium and the time of a piece that invokes a more mythic time. But here there is a stronger knowingness about what is happening--a knowledge of that very collision--that often emerges from the pictures and lends many of them a kind of whimsy and playfulness. This air seems to come from the artifice of costuming, which turns traditional "greening" costumes (like Jack o' the Green or the Green Man) into something more graceful and artful, but also emerges in the expressive faces of a few of the models.

Thaliad

The foliated, crowned faces and decked torsos are marvelous. It's impossible to pick a single favorite. But I know what to do with rhubarb this year!

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Hat tip to the nimble-minded writer Haddayr Copley-Woods, whose name neatly and appropriately combines art (John Singleton Copley) and forests. Later addendum: Being a foliate-head lover, I'd be interested in what people especially like--which ones and why.

Samples of The Foliate Head poems and excerpts from Thaliad are at Scribd.

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Meeting me elsewhere: excerpts from 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Thaliad, The Foliate Head) at Scribd. Thaliad at Phoenicia Publishing. See page tabs above for review clips and information on those brand new books plus The Throne of Psyche from 2011, and more.

Precarious beauties

Over the years I have been friends with many visual artists and often found that what they said had a curious resonance for me--that it meant more about my own work in words that one might have assumed, and sometimes more than what other writers had to say.  I like what Andy Goldsworthy writes in Time (Henry N. Abrams, 2000) about moving along the edge of collapse, about beauty balanced above the ice:

The beauty of the red is its connection to life--underwritten by fragility, pain, and violence--words that I would have to use in describing beauty itself. This sense of life draws me to nature, but with it also comes an equally strong sense of death. I cannot walk far before seeing something dead and decaying. Uprooted trees, fallen rocks, landslides, flood damage... A grip on beauty is necessary for me to feel and make sense of its underlying precariousness. So many of my sculptures are within a hair's breadth of failure. I often see works--a balanced column of rocks, stacked icicles--looking stronger with each piece that is added, but also know that each addition takes it closer to the edge of collapse. Some of my most memorable works have been made in this way, and some of my worst failures could have produced some great pieces. Beauty does not avoid difficulty but hovers dangerously above it--like walking on thin ice.

Goldsworthy Redux

I woke up to brighter light—new snow—and thought about Andy Goldsworthy. I’m still wondering if those three stacked stones in the edge of the lake were his, a sort of private conversation with Otsego Lake and Kingfisher Tower, back when he was doing a project near Albany…  Perhaps it was simply homage to him, he being so near at the time.  He’s such an oddly Old Testament sort of figure, setting up cairns and stacked stone markers where he has had an encounter with the otherworldly this-worldly.  I am very glad he does it, though I am also glad that I make my cairns out of words.

My idea of Andy Goldsworthy is very appealing, the thought that he gets up early and works in the cold (being a Southerner, I do not want to go and do likewise!) in order to search for some kind of “rightness” and to make something that appears effortless.  It is a right goal of all art, to labor in order to create what seems tossed-off, effortless, or as natural as a leaf spiring from the darkness of earth.

Another thing I like about Goldsworthy is that he is not afraid to be silly and play, and that for him the whole world becomes the realm of art. For him, the landscape is always on the verge of revelation—it reveals itself in speaking water, stone, air, and fire. (Fire often appears when ice or particles or fur catch light, but it can also appear in transformed vegetable matter, as when a disk of earth-blackened leaves inside a sort of tequila sunrise of yellow-orange-red leaves shows that energy burned in a place as a bonfire does in a ring of stones.)

A great wheel of upbuilding and raveling never stops, and at its dark center one verges onto another world. It’s rather like the biblical injunction to “pray without ceasing”—that is, to make one’s entire life lit with the radiance of knowing God, knowing a greater life and being more alive. Art is always calling us to a larger life, to other worlds…

A large part of Andy Goldsworthy's art is to make one see this world with infant sight. That means that when, say, a great cairn of bleached driftwood (black-hearted, topped by a disk of darkness and absence) unwinds and floats apart as the sea comes in, we will see it drawn away as if into another plane, another reality—the work being a sort of nest of time raveled and invaded by eternity, a new sort of making rather than simple unmaking. The marriage of the dark center with the earthly driftwood limbs is seemingly dissolved yet encompasses more as it disintegrates, widening to hold the sea and vanishing as if into another realm—the sea accepts its gift.

So incense went up from sacrifice, sending up a wavering ladder of fragrance between one world and another.  Likewise Goldsworthy’s great upright circles of polar ice blocks or stone work work rather in the way pierced stone was said to allow fairy sight, transforming the eye and showing a new world, there all the time but unseen.