"Bad" Drawing

Bad drawing by educated avante-garde  artists is a sign of homage to Cezanne.   like a population of Castillian Spaniards who developed a lisp so their youthful handicapped king would not feel damaged because of his speech defect, his lisp.  Great draughtsmen / women have been hiding their gifts since 1905.  It has simply not been cool to be a sublime *draughtsman  but most artists who have been touched by angels will go through a brief phase demonstrating their mastery and then drink the Kool Aid and klunk it up. * Draughtsman: a man or woman who draws in the realm of fine art not one who labors in an architect or engineer's office - these are draftsmen.  Drawers are knickers are underpants

"Bad" drawing:  Drawing by someone who has natural or hard-won drawing skill who chooses to downplay or hide this skill in order to signify obeisance to the norms of twentieth century art.

Ingres Management

“Drawing is the probity of art”   Jean Dominique IngresDrawing don’t mean doodly squat in art.    Paul Cezanne Ingres is often mistaken for being a great draughtsman, almost always by people write about art, not practitioners.  Ingres was an intensely careful draughtsman but he was not a great one.  Great draughtsmen have processed their fear.  They are fearless and joyful in their mastery.  Raphael, Daumier, Lautrec, Della Bella, Michaelangelo, Bernini and Rodin were great draughtsmen probably because drawing was secondary to their primary creative agenda.  Ingres was a drawing fetishist.  Great draughtsmen do not get consumed by line.  They issue line unconsciously like a spider issues filament.  It is second nature.  One can always see fear in the drawn line if it is present and fear is all around the drawings of Ingres,  preventing his work from rising to greatness.  Great draughting is sensuous, generous and accurate.  It captures sublime bliss and transcendent soul-power.

Reginald Marsh was a great draughtsman as was Daumier and young Ken Dallison (see: Esquire Magazine - 1967 - article-drawings of Robin Olds' dogfighting in his F-4 Phantom in vietnam)

Matisse and Picasso: Equals?

Matisse and Picasso were never equals.  Matisse was taking arrows for the avante- garde for many years before Picasso began to establish his reputation in Paris.  Matisse was the pioneer of Modern painting, the Davy Crockett, the mountain man of the early twentieth century generation of innovators in painting.  Given Picasso’s innate skittishness manifest in his abandonment of Cubism during the first world war due to its connection to things German (Kahnweiler-Picasso’s dealer was German) Picasso had included German signs in his work (KUB - bullion cubes),  it is unlikely that he would have ever transcended his Lautrec bravura  and soulful narrative tendencies. It was due to the bold innovations of Matisse’s Fauves that Picasso was pressured to conceive a commensurate response to Cezanne manifest as Cubism.  Remember, it was Gertrude Stein, who did not like Matisse because he would not kiss her ass at her little soirees which he avoided , who recorded and promulgated Matisse’s unfortunate remark about his only ambition being to create paintings that make hardworking bourgeoisie comfortable;  "Paintings like an easy chair".  Matisse made this off-hand remark in jest after being the wild child of Paris for a decade and at a time that his reputation as a leader of Parisian art circles was secure.    Picasso was one of a generation of  followers of Matisse not an equal.

Marching Orders

I do not call the art politburo every morning to get marching orders for my painting.  I’ll try not to fall victim to the narratives of Clement Greenberg on flatness or John Hughes on painterly painting or Arthur Danto on irony, social issues, minimalism, gesture etc.  I try not to paint dumb or to fall into easy traps of seduction of line, color, tone, composition yet I don’t want to deny myself the pleasure of exploring what may be part of an archaic canon but not yet part of my own history of experience.  I want to know the six hundred year history and make use of at least some of the great inventions of western painting  in the service of my exploration.  Perhaps by now I have internalized the politburo’s marching orders - no need to call.

Andy Warhol Adds Value

Adding value to an artist’s work in painting is like adding value to a song copyright - the work is created and it can sit around being a work of genius no one knows about  or the artist can engage in publicity- generating activity that brings the work into the public eye,  adding monetary value to it.  Record companies used to get a large percentage of music publishing royalties originally held by the songwriter, ostensibly because the companies added value that would not otherwise accrue  by financing a variety of activities: music videos, concerts, television appearances and radio record promotion. The genius of Andy Warhol is that he knowingly created art commodities to be marketed by his careful mimesis of products for which tens of millions of advertising dollars had already been spent.  Warhol’s work was pre-marketed.  Warhol was just a flea on the back of the big dog of American commercial enterprise: Coca Cola, Campbell’s Soup, Brillo Soap Pads, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.  This is the core of his genius,  Andy’s big idea,  his contribution to the canon of contemporary art stemming from Duchamp.  Warhol got so much intellectual mileage  for his supposed ironic slant on consumer capitalism,  when it was simply a very astute, streetwise use of an enormous store of untapped consumer product bounty.

Artist's Statements

When a visual artist submits to writing an artist’s statement they are sacrificing their power, their mojo, their independence as visual communicators to the larger art world game, to the realm of galleries, museums and other lampreys on the act of creation.  It is like bending over and spreading your ass cheeks for your doctor.  You submit to his realm.  “Now, this is not gonna hurt.”    If a person who has dedicated their career to the visual arts cannot read a work of visual art thus gaining purchase on its meaning then they ought to sell shoes.  The whole reason art exists is that the idea cannot be expressed in words unless you’re Jenny Holtzer.  Statements about art, if they must be made, should be created by an astute other, not the artist themselves.  I have been painting and writing for fifty years and I can’t begin to write even a short paragraph about what my art means or what it is.  It’s like asking a dog what their dog statement is - “Well - let’s see, I wag my tail, I like to jump into the water and I like to snooze in the sun - oh! And chase balls.  Thanks poochy, this clears up your meaning.  Any artist who writes a statement about their work has been duped.  If your work needs a statement in order to clarify its intention or its purpose and some work is enriched by this text,  hire a grad student to write about it or an aspiring art critic. Just say no to artist’s statements.

Flash Management

If institutions of higher learning that teach the “Mother Art” - architecture see fit to offer courses in the business of architecture perhaps our art departments in these same universities could offer a course called “Flash Management” - How to leverage one’s fifteen minutes of fame into an entire career in the fine arts.  It is the fate of most artists to lack the skills or interest in the world outside of their zone of creation to even support themselves.

Late Cezanne

One of the reason’s Cezanne’s late paintings are great is that they so deeply involve the viewer.  This work demands that the viewer align the painted objects and spatial effects with one’s internalized notions of linear and aerial  perspective.  It demands that the sketchy trees be fully foliated, the earth solidified, the sky pasted into uniform atmosphere.  One’s brain strives to deny the objectness of the painting and to establish pictorial space.  It is as if the painting is a dehydrated sponge ripe with potential and our act of seeing adds water creating a full, round esthetic experience.  Magic happens as we look.   It is this tension, generated by a will to complete the work, to participate, that so fully engages us in these paintings.

First Tier Painting: A Definition

We celebrate many first tier artists who are second-tier painters.  Second-tier painting is a closed system.  Loose ends are all tied up, all ambiguity is resolved,  Chuck Close, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Estes and John Currin come to mind.  Each of these painters has proved that second tier painting can be first tier art.  It takes a particular strain of courage to leave room in the work for viewer participation.  When the viewer is included you double the brain waves in the art experience.  Second-tier / closed-system painters erect barriers around their work that says: “Keep your distance - admire my skill, my obsessive tenacity, my hard work - don’t stand too close (pun intended), don’t block the sunlight  - I’m  the artist - you’re not - I’ve got to spell this whole thing out for you”  or perhaps “I’m just insecure and must prove to myself that I have the skill to resolve all ambiguity as if it were a sign of weakness not to have all the answers.  The top rank of painters do not pretend to have all of the answers.  They admit they are not God even on their own small model of the universe, their canvas.  Great painters invite the viewer to help them close the gap and thus invited, the viewer engages the work, looks more closely, he can’t help himself.  The mind of the viewer must try to fill the voids that remain perhaps unconsciously as a seductive invitation by its author.  It is this subliminal interplay between a painting and a viewer that sets off the spark of life in the work.  This spark is rarely contained in the work alone no matter how many amazing picture-making strategies are employed.  This explains why so much truly mind-bending photorealism leaves one undernourished.  A painter might ask herself: how might I offer this invitation in my work because painting elk nostril vapor at sunrise is not enough.A late Cezanne painting looks very finished to us now,  as does a Monet or a Rose Period Picasso.  At the time these were created they were seen by many as mere daubs, far from completed work.  We have been trained throughout the past one hundred years to see a lot with little modeling of form or rendering of space.  We now see with potent suggestions only.  Picasso and Braque taught us a code for human body parts:  faces, hands, hair, limbs, therefore, the amount of visual information required to start a dialogue with the average gallery / museum visitor becomes reduced over time.   This leads to engagement occurring in work that is entirely non-representational, non-narrative, non-anecdotal.  Paintings such as de Kooning’s “Women” of the early 1950s now appear as fleshed out as a Rococo maiden (Boucher, Fragonard).

Bravura Skill

Bravura skill has become an ugly trap in the world of drawing and painting over the course of the past century.  It is now seen as post-Cezanne seduction.  The possessor of such skill seduces not only the general civilian public but often himself as well.  Dash, flash, dynamic line, painterly touch (on the money with hue and placement) why?  What’s not to love about this sort of work?  Cezanne cracked this nut wide open and brushed it off the table.  With no bravura skill or much skill at all he became the greatest painter and artist of his age or any and all ages.  Cezanne proved that the deep truth and communion with universal energy was independent of physical pyrotechnics.  Young Picasso had the bravura skill of his more mature and internationally successful countryman Sorolla but after seeing Cezanne in 1905 Picasso searched for deeper, more exotic sources for his work.  He began to pursue  ancient Iberian sculpture and sub-Saharan tribal art - a deeper vein that, when conflated with the heresies of late Cezanne, gave birth to Cubism.

Artists: Explorers and Miners

There are two types of artists: miners and explorers.  Miners discover a conceptual lode and work it throughout their careers with adjustments to their work to give an appearance of creative development - Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Norman Rockwell, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, John Currin.  Explorers are always seeking new territory like Lewis and Clark or The Spanish explorers of the sixteenth century (minus the genocide).  Picasso was an explorer for many years prior to his late phase when he was mining  an idiosyncratic private language.  Most of the artists whose names and work we know are miners.  It seems to require the relentless telling of the same story to break through.  One might think that there are far more miners than explorers but this is not true.  It is that explorers remain obscure because their names are rarely associated with a personal style.  Most miners endured an intense explorer phase, usually in art school and accompanied by anxiety, fear and poverty - there was nothing to lose by bold experimentation.  Why not try a bit of everything - see what sticks to the wall.  Once recognition strikes (often along with some money), the artist puts down a claim on their idea and they begin to mine it to both their exhaustion and ours.  There may be an x curve at work here with the depth of the anxiety of ignominy in inverse proportion to the desire to remain an explorer once “discovered”  Picasso was discovered as a little boy and didn’t have an explosive emotional event  as a young man when someone first paid some money and attention to his work thus freeing him psychically to explore throughout most of his career.  Edward Baum, one of my Harvard architecture professors said to me “One can measure the quality of a creative mind by how long the person can remain in a state of uncertainty.”  How long can one continue exploring without having an answer, a solution, either to a specific problem or to the challenge of an entire career.  Does one have the guts for the anxiety of exploration.  Exploring is more admirable than mining.  The art establishment and our galaxy of art galleries make little money from explorers.  These entities, for the most part, encourage one to become a miner ASAP.  Galleries and explorers are almost always adversaries with some brave and notable exceptions.  For a gallery, art is a commodity and if the brand represents something different every season it is hard to market.  There’s room for one or two Picasso scale explorers in a generation and everyone else who wishes to make a living in art is advised to get in line - start to mine.

Yin (art) Yang (viewer)

Metamimesis:  The abstraction of abstraction i.e. Picasso abstracting Cezanne who abstracted nature and what is nature an abstraction of?  God?  Pure energy? Every artwork contains its yin - the work itself and its yang - the consciousness of the viewer.  In the pre-World War One era in Paris, all viewers carried a firm knowledge of the history of western painting from their visits to the Louvre as well as visits to annual Beaux Arts exhibitions - the official, state-sponsored salons.  This was a very astute audience whose forward thinking members could see that the work of Cezanne  Matisse, Picasso, and Braque was extending a great tradition,  that these artists were pioneers,  breaking the bonds of a stagnant realm of ideas about painting.  If an artist knows that his/her audience is informed, educated, trained and curious for the new,  he can explore more boldly without being completely divorced from fellow humans. The esthetic, intellectual fertility of the Paris citizen inspired adventure in their avante-garde artists.  The game was on.  When a community of artists can depend on an educated adventurous audience,  their ideas can flourish.  In a hermetic pressure cooker like New York City, where the level of education and the taste for esthetic adventure  spikes far above the provincial norm and you add feisty, ambitious, erudite  and voluble art critics, the dance between yin(artist and his work)and yang (audience ) becomes extreme, thus events like Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Newman, Rothko can occur followed by a fevered yin/yang tango with Warhol, Lichtenstein and Stella.  Then the stakes get even higher and  inaccessible to the flyovers: Judd, Andre, and Flavin. Thomas Kinkaide works just as hard as Chuck Close every day at his easel but he gets no respect from the cognoscenti.  Kinkaide is playing to an unschooled yang.  To people who have not studied art.  Kinkaide must stock each painting with its own yang - its own apologists, its own total story.  His audience brings so little to his party that he must help them and they respond to his efforts by purchasing his work in monumental quantities.  In the art establishment there is an assumption of yang level that makes Kinkaide uncool and Warhol or now, Richard Prince, king.  You must at least know the Greenberg/ Rosenberg stable of artists as well as Duchamp to “get” Andy Warhol.  You must be trained in contemporary art  and theory.  People whose parents spent the money to ensure their children’s training do not want to waste that intellectual capital by diffusing the heft of their yang on the likes of Thomas Kinkaide.  How does one explain John Currin?  Or the narrative, anecdotal hyperglycemic work that fills the walls of the Mary Boone Gallery or L.A. Louver?  How does one explain David Hockney’s pastoral mimesis?  It’s the New Feudalism -every ship on its own bottom - the group- grope conceptual / ironic yang-fest of the 50s through 90s is over.  We are now in a moment when even our most prominent new York galleries, the inner circle of the avante-garde art world, valorizes obsessive miners of a nineteenth century tradition rather than  explorers.  As evidence of the New Feudalism, our streets are filled with thirty-something men in their big, noisy trucks. Every one a feudal lord with no interest or faith in government on any level.  There is no community either in new York City or Redwood City or anywhere in-between.  The vampire squid (corporatocracy / financial industry) has had its way with us.  Our blood is gone.  Art is getting dumber.

Dang the yang - full steam ahead!

Celebrate Cubism Centennial

We are entering the zone of the one hundredth anniversary of the epochal pan-cultural paradigm shift that changed all art and science.  The year 1912 is the locus of revolutions in painting, physics, music, dance, fiction, poetry, politics and technology.  It was as if the earth passed through an intergalactic cloud whose molecules shook our civilization to its roots.  Imagine a gas was inhaled by creative geniuses of the time:  Picasso and Braque invent Cubism, Einstein develops the Special Theory of Relativity, Stravinsky and Schoenberg develop new tonal systems for making music, Isadora Duncan unpins Baroque dance (classical ballet), the Wright Brothers introduce pitch, yaw and roll simultaneously into the possibilities of human mechanized movement, James Joyce experiments with fictional expression, motion pictures are invented and all of life begins to accelerate intensely.It is time to celebrate one of the more potent of these manifestations of the 1912 shift - Cubism.  Locating the locus of the birth of Cubism (rather than the proto-Cubism of “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon”) in the work done by Picasso in the mountain village of Gosol in the summer of 1909 and spring of 1910 when he painted “Portrait of Fanny Tellier”.  The autumn of 2009 and spring of 2010 is the one hundredth anniversary of this epochal group of paintings.  Let’s celebrate this development, Cubism,  that revolutionized all visual art and architecture.  As a painter and architect, Cubism is my slice of the paradigm shift pie.

Artwork: quasi-cubist inspired painting: Jim Blake 2009

Koons - Hirst - Murakami

The celebration of machine finish in the work of Judd,  Koons, Murakami and Hirst removes the only qualifier, touch, that could tell us if bliss were present or not, in the end product.  Machine finish is a useful trope in the world of big-time, celebrated commodity art.  If we can deny touch as a component of the most esteemed work then second rate work can pass as masterpieces.  This work may have had sublime touch, thus qualifying it for the pantheon but we’ll never know.  These artists have become like architects i.e. executives in an object delivery system.  There is no “touch” in a work of architecture other than that of the anonymous workmen who build it.   Lack of touch  in a building does not edit it from consideration from the pantheon of the sublime but it does edit out a work of art.

Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn’s first New York gallery show was in 1954.  It sold out.  It was a big hit, why?  Matisse had recently died and was on everyone’s mind and Diebenkorn’s work looked as if he were channeling early Matisse. The bold color, the brushwork, composition / geometries and line.  RD arrived on the New York art scene with work that was as familiar as an old shoe to the New York art cognoscenti and as seductive as sex.  Just as Diebenkorn capitalized on a brand that had been road/culture/market tested, so did Andy Warhol but  where RD rode on the back of the 20th Century’s most hallowed art world brand -Henri Matisse, Warhol expanded his scope to encompass the great brands of all consumer culture. In 1954 Richard Diebenkorn was scanning Matisse’s early years for inspiration.  During the “Ocean Park” years in his Venice, California studio Diebenkorn had narrowed his focus on Matisse to a single painting, “Zora on the Terrace” painted in 1912.  The entire Ocean Park series, considered to be masterpieces by many-not me,  though they are certainly beautiful,  is based on just the background of this single painting.  Diebenkorn looked as closely at and borrowed from Matisse as though Matisse were nature itself - metamimesis.

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg’s * mystification in the face of Picasso and Braque’s invention of Cubism is analogous to a U.S. Supreme Court justice finding Marbury v Madison  a big mystery.  It is odd that an art critic and theorist widely hailed as the most powerful and influential of the twentieth century can be mystified by the foundations of his chosen field.  Evidence of Greenberg’s mis-framing of Cubism is that he viewed Cubism as something transcendent, a higher synthesis of previous recent avante-garde art developments in painting.  Cubism is a devolution from Cezanne, a Cliff’s notes, a Cezanne for Dummies, A complete idiot’s guide to Cezanne’s  paradigm shattering art.  Cubism is an abstract shorthand of the salient features of late Cezanne’s skewed linear perspective, the passage, the facture and the crippled drawing, strategies that conflated pictorial space and the surface of the canvas.  The profound Godliness of Cezanne was inaccessible to ambitious youth in a hurry but his strategies had to be assimilated and demonstrated thus Cubism’s unpinned station point, simultaneity and constricted narrative content.  Talented and ambitious young artists in Paris were not about to spend ten years in isolation in the countryside with an umbrella, a canvas stool and a box of paints in order to commune with God.  They were, however, glad someone had done as much and were all happy to acknowledge the monumental achievement.  Cubism was a tool for instant access to Cezanne, a shorthand, Cezanne light.It helps me to have struggled as a painter with Cubism  for many years,  not limited to intellectual/ literary devices only.  Reading and looking are not enough to grasp Cubism fully - one must have two sets of knowledge: the theory and graphic procedures of linear perspective and  experience as a painter investigating ideas of pictorial space otherwise one gets bogged down in semantics and vaporous musing - see: everything ever written about Cubism from day one until now.

* “How Picasso and Braque got to their Cubism in 1910 and proceeded thence to 1914 remains unimaginable to me”  - Greenberg’s 1980 essay in Late Writings,  ed. Robert C. Morgan, Janice Van Hoove, Univ. of MN Press,  2003

I owe Clement Greenberg a big posthumous thank you for selecting a suite of nine of my drawings, “Korean Airliner Disaster series” for a nationwide drawing competition in 1985. The Syracuse University “Drawing National.”  This exhibit toured the nation with stops at a dozen major art museums.  "The Korean Airliner Disaster" series can be seen on my art website: jimblakeart.com

Dylan and Painting

Bob Dylan, as a great artist who had so many brilliant ideas about his chosen art - songwriting, Dylan, a gifted painter and draughtsman,  should be able to make the distinction between concept and expression.  In his memoir, Dylan fails to make the distinction between art and painting. The following is an example for Bob.  Andy Warhol was a mediocre painter, silk screener but a great artist. He had a big idea about art and popular culture.  A person can look at a Warhol work and say he was an uninspired painter,  Andy would be the first to agree but one cannot say that he was an uninspired artist.  It’s not about the painting, it’s about the art.  Millions of civilians fail to make this distinction, Bob Dylan among them.