If you paint the sun, you are always confronted with a specific choice: you either have to try and establish the correct value relationship by making the sun very light on your canvas or you must go for the color, in which case the value relationship will be incorrect but the color relationship will be closer to the truth.
We would do well to drop the term avant-garde and to stop thinking in terms of art movements generally. So much of the “it has never been done before” shock-of-the-new during the latter half of the 20th century was contrived, top down, investment driven efforts to turn junk into iconic art products.
Duchamp, as either genius or pawn, remains a central figure in 20th century visual art. Again Marquis: “Duchamp opened the door – even the museum door – to art featuring feces, urine, and other bodily fluids; to art based on junk recovered from the city dump; to art involving cadavers and maggots; and to art with aggressively sexual themes. Artists who display their own naked or provocatively clothed bodies may also point to Duchamp. In short, the avant-garde art of the late twentieth century flaunts impropriety, defiance, messiness, and snickering disdain for the vast majority of museum-goers.”
Pushing in this sense means to push oneself further, to strain or reach further. Feeling and seeing more richly, however, does not come about by simply looking more intently. The particularity of any given feeling, when I paint, arises out of an expression of who I am in the moment that I am making choices. A writer may choose one word or a series of words from a vocabulary of 100,000 separate words, for example. In my case, as a painter, I must choose a very specific color and a way of applying the color, also from thousands of possibilities. That is how I express myself as a painter. I must act, I must choose. My choices will differ from someone else’s. That is why a painting will be called, if it is sincere, a Monet or a Renoir or a Smith, Jones, or Fresia.
As you know, if you don’t paint everyday, the paint on your palette dries up. Good-bye expensive paint. This will contribute to you using lesser and lesser amounts and then your paintings will go downhill from there. You’ve heard of the saran wrap trick, the freezing trick, well forget freezing and saran wrap. That’s for amateurs. Now – drum roll please! – here’s the real trick of tricks: keep your paints….
Learning to paint has less to do with learning new techniques than it does with learning new ways to be free.
The separation of the teaching of painting from discussions of politics or literature or philosophy or whatever is entirely artificial and, I would add, harmful to the growth of anyone seeking truly free expression. In order to teach art, one has to be free to move seamlessly across disciplinary boundaries. In order to make art, one has to be free to “let go of many common and overestimated things” (Henri) such as stale, grade school, thread-bare justifications of power and privilege that also have the effect of limiting what art we make and how we make it.
The measure of a painting, as in all other life-giving activities, is the feeling one has as one does the activity, whether it is making love or making a painting. The payoff is always in the moment of expressing, and therefore realizing, one’s feelings. This is the moment of creation. And delightfully, the process creates the work. The painting simply follows, as by-product of the experience.
In every single painting, assuming we wish to create a sense of space and that we are painting from nature, we want the values to be properly related; that is, we would like dark things to actually be darker than light things. So here’s the way to do this: SQUINT and compare. Because we cannot focus when we squint, it is far easier to see the whole thing and compare the values.
Robert Henri, in his classic The Art Spirit, actually dedicates several pages to the brushstroke and the feelings they evoke. Here is just a small sample of his descriptions: “There are timid, halting brush strokes…other strokes which inspire a sense of vigor, direction, speed, fullness and all the varying sensations an artist may wish to express. The mere brushstroke itself must speak….It is showy, shallow, mean, meager, selfish, has the skimp of a miser; is rich, full, generous, alive and knows what is going on.”