The Art Class
Lessons From Madrid
Sorolla’s drawings are totally playful, mind and body are fused. A freshness and immediacy is in evidence throughout. When I look at this kind of thing, I also can’t help wonder, with the appointment of Tracy Emin as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts for example, if the sense of mystery and magic that seems to course through Sorolla’s drawings and so much of art at the turn of the last century hasn’t been entirely purged and thus made forbidden by today’s high-flying art world gatekeepers.
Painting As Lifeline
We unfashionable easel painters live in art world adversity. And you know those methods that you studied, paid for, and worked hard to master? Those methods which allow you “to feel larger, more powerful, more beautiful” (to quote Emma Goldman)? They are like young Peter’s yellow, old article from the NYT. They are lifelines in a world that is moving with a tortured tension, to paraphrase Nietzsche, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river as toward catastrophe.
The Danger of Huge Opportunities
To paraphrase Foucault, my desire in contrasting the early critique of the bourgeoisie with the unreflective embrace of entrepreneurialism today is not to say that today’s entrepreneurial activity in the art world is bad. But it is to say that it is dangerous. It works to subvert the independence and autonomy required of people who wish to enjoy their lives as rich expressive activities, each life different in its originality, each person measured by a different yardstick.
Squinting is Forever
Squinting (and then comparing) is likewise an imperative. It helps us to see things just in terms of line and color. It enables us to simplify. And thus it provides a way of exiting our normal modes of perception and entering into a mood where our sense of presence is heightened, where we are able to see and feel a dimension of sensuality that had been, prior to that moment, invisible.
Five Part Harmony
“The practice of art should have an effect not only on the public, but even more importantly, on the artist himself, by enlarging his sphere of freedom. Once this is understood and becomes a profound part of artistic practice, the problem of being a mere manufacturer of expensive objects disappears; pictures are justifiable because they are steps in their maker’s artistic development. Each picture is valuable only insofar as it contributes to this development, because it enables the artist to go on in a freer, larger way to his next picture (my emphasis).”
Scumbling With Monet
Scumbling is generally used in the underpainting – literally a full color painting that sits under the next layer where paint is applied stroke by stroke. The underpainting is a layer where one obtains the atmospheric color that bathes everything like “breath on glass.” Thus, the technique allows one to apply paint not in strokes but in patches or veils that overlap.
A Painting Demo
Think of the entire process as a pedagogy of the senses. In each stage, the sensations of line or color are simply prompts to which I must respond by touching the canvas with my brush, rendering my feelings in that moment and, in that moment, realizing who I am. That’s the payoff. The painting is complete in every stage much as a person is complete at any age.
Paint a Head As You Would a Doorknob
…just respond to the sensations of line and color. Never see a head as a head or a house as a house; otherwise, you will attempt to make something that looks like a head or a house and in your effort to get the right result or likeness of the thing over there, your ability to feel just the line of it or the color of it will be diminished. The work will be a reference to the thing over there but it will less likely be an expression of your feelings.
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