The banana taped to a wall by one artist, sold for $120,000 and then was eaten by a second artist. Must the first artist, then, replace the original banana with a phony second banana? Who would be so foolish to ask this question? Duchamp's snow shovel, a ready-made...
There should never be a finished canvas, just the different states of a single painting. To finish, to achieve – don’t those words have a double meaning – to terminate, to execute, but also to put to death, to give the coup de grâce? If I paint as many canvases as I do, it is because I am searching for spontaneity and when I have expressed the thing with a degree of happiness, I have no courage to add anything at all. – Picasso
Schultz, in the painting seen above, demonstrates that the function of the method is not to churn out a tedious and predictable picture of the subject. The stages are not an assembly line. Instead, they break the sensory experience of the painter into pieces. Each piece functions as a prompt. The task of the painter is to put the pieces back together in a way that freshly realizes – makes clear – who she is. It is, fundamentally, a process of becoming. The painting happens along the way.
My job as a teacher is to break the painting process down into its constitutive parts and to lay bare those parts to illuminate the order and relationship of the parts for the students. So teaching has the unfortunate aspect of making an organic process seem mechanical. The required paradigm shift that I mention is this: as one paints, one needs to transition to a realm of wonder and excitement. It’s about expression, not production.
Here’s the problem and the threat: Vincent’s professed purpose in life is to show “what’s in the heart of the lowest of the low.” He paints sincerely and independently, his beliefs are clear, his convictions resolute. In other words, Vincent can’t be bought. And whom does this type of artist threaten? …. Who are these people? Well, according to the sane Cézanne, they are the people who want to “get their hooks into you,” the “dirty bourgeoisie.” Oops, can’t tell that story. So Schnabel takes the story in another direction.
If our art is to be expressive, we need marks on the canvas that reflect the gamut of emotion that corresponds to the visual experience we are having…….All of the above pertains to line as well as color.
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.
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.
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 (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.