If you aim in a painting, you know too much where you want it to go, you’re already at a great disadvantage because it means that all the alternative moves – you can’t make them – don’t fit into your scheme…….The one thing you don’t want to know how to do, as a painter, is knowing how to do the thing too well ahead of time. You don’t want to make it into a performance. There has to be a bit of uncertainty attached to it.
Questions about color are understandable; why wouldn’t I want to know what colors someone uses so that I may achieve similar results?…..The danger here is that the process, so wonderfully articulated by the Impressionists as one driven by sensation, would be transformed into a formulaic production process, driven by thought. The life-giving experience where one truly learns to see beyond the ordinary could possibly be lost…..We don’t begin seeing color by recalling some mixture someone else used in an entirely different setting! Here’s a better way of asking someone about color use. “How do you see those colors?”
So what is this Mona Lisa “curse” that Hughes witnessed, as a supreme insider, with “growing disgust?” It was the “giant shift” or “cultural engineering,” in full swing by the 1990s, that transformed the production and exhibition of “important” art into an investor’s dream: a market that maximized returns with virtually no real chance of downturns……The curse, argues Hughes, “affects artists… how art is made and above all the way it is experienced. And this curse has infected the entire art world.”
Monet advises us repeatedly, “don’t see the object before you.” In other words, don’t see trees or fields or skies as trees, fields, and skies. Don’t be literal. Just see color and where values separate, or line. So the method he used was an oscillation between line and color. The whole thing is an unfolding; it is complete in every stage. There is no point called “finish.” One stops when one has nothing more to say or when one wishes to say nothing more.
“I understood…that I had no business painting to please other people….If [a painter] is concerned with success, he works with just the one idea: pleasing people and selling. He loses the support of his own conscience and is dependent on how others are feeling. He neglects his gifts and eventually loses them….[painters painting for prizes] were lost souls.…”
Baudelaire might be the perfect guy to help me get out of my head, to see and feel the world sensuously, to treat every line and color as a visual and sensual prompt to which I am compelled to respond emotionally. Look at the way he urges us, as artists, to do this:
“You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way….But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk….”
Matisse himself was a product of rigorous academic training; however, he thought that his particular academic training was “deadly for young artists.” [1] But Matisse didn’t confuse Parisian academic training (that served the interest of a ruling class) with rigorous training per se. In 1908, when he formed his own school, he noted the following:
“The few exhibitions that I have had the opportunity of seeing during these last years, makes me fear that the young painters are avoiding the slow and painful preparation which is necessary for the education of any contemporary painter who claims to construct by color alone….”
This what Monet meant when he said “don’t see the things before you.” Just see the color. The trick of course is to squint, compare, and train your eyes to see just color (or line) and not things with names. As painters, we must understand that concepts in our head undermine the seeing of color (or sensations). We think we are seeing but actually we are reading. Skies are blue, apples are red, trees are green and so are mountains. That’s what it means to be “literal.”
There is only one profession where the word “starving” is accepted as an appropriate adjective – ie, starving artist. To be honest, I think this is due to the fact that artists embrace and celebrate the market and the private economy instead of resisting it – instead of thinking creatively beyond the canvas. I don’t think it takes a whole lot of insight to figure out that the point of the art industry is not to expand the circle of art and creativity, but to insure that “art” is the province of a few very wealthy people …
Painters today, unknowingly – or perhaps I should say unreflectively – embrace practices that control the very creative processes that could give them life………The artist is someone who seeks freedom from the control that market-driven entrepreneurs, market-driven investors, all those people who control exhibitions-exposure-competitions, and all those people who grab you by the short hairs require.