art as work

I like the idea that art is labor intensive, whether this be a novel, a cd, a painting, a film, whatever. Aside from my poor hearing issues I don’t like going to concerts because they are less precise/intensive and more expensive than the accompanying cd. I don’t necessarily want making art to involve a lot of painful toil and emotionally depleting effort, but I do expect an investment of time. Writing a play in forty-eight hours is an interesting exercise, but this condensed schedule should also preclude it from being taken too seriously.

So another artist was telling me that whenever they do a public painting event they try to produce a piece of work every half an hour and sell that piece for thirty five dollars.

This prompted a lot of conflicting emotions in me.

Like: “And people buy them?” “Yes,” the artist assures me, “I sell most of them”.

And I think, Well good for you. And then I think, You’re a schmuck. You are ripping people off. How dare you charge people that much for something that you invest so little time in.

And then I think, this artist has been working for fifteen or twenty years, so that experience should be factored into the price. And if people like the work and want to pay for it, then charge whatever the market will bear.

And then I think, Wait seventy dollars and hour. I can’t justify anyone making that much money, let alone an artist. I am a bit of a socialist in this way, but that’s a tangent for a different day.

But this artist doesn’t make this kind of wage consistently, they’re not making a hundred and twenty five grand a year, they only do a couple of these events a year and who am I to begrudge an artist getting a five hundred dollar day a couple times a year.

I charge less than three dollars an hour for my paintings, less than half of minimum wage. Making minimum wage is a long-term goal for me. Who’s wrong here? Am I an idiot or is this person a con artist.

But this is an established, mid-career artist who has worked up to this point, and I’m just hoping to have a solo show maybe eventually, it’s only fair that it be this unfair.

It should probably give me something to aspire to. Instead I make pledges to myself that I will never charge this much. I would rather go without food for a day than charge more than two thousand dollars for anything I make. And I feel (perhaps pretentiously) assured for a little while.

And then I have to pay some bills. And later I think I am going to make a huge painting, four by four feet (not really huge by most people’s standards). I do the math on the square inches and at my current three dollars an hour or less wage it will probably price out at thirteen hundred fifty. Which seems like a ridiculous amount of money to charge for it. But it will take me at least three to four months of solid work to complete.

And then I start to think I should charge more.

more on Edward Corbett

Corbett’s paintings are abstract, but do have a certain resonance of nature/landscape. Occasionally there is a horizon line, but generally it’s something about his paintings’ expansiveness that echoes something of the western landscape.

Again I identify with this imperative. I feel continually inspired by nature and yet reluctant to retain any specifics. Just because the painting was based on a photo I took of wildflowers doesn’t mean it’s about wildflowers. And frequently I’m afraid that naming the source (when I can remember it) will deflate the viewer. As in a viewer says to me, This is a lovely painting, and I say, Yes it’s based on a crate of rotting apples, I found the way they had either retained some of their round form or decayed and softened away from it really interesting. Or if not disgusting the viewer in this way, something like telling the way a magic trick is done, like it might make the painting more mundane, as in the viewer says, This is a lovely painting, all these colors and the nuances of light, and then I say, Yes, it’s based on some stones in a creek.

So I want to avoid making the paintings this specific. Not necessarily grand in the way Corbett aimed to do, but to use painting to capture the sublime elegance of nature.

Here’s Landauer on Corbett:

He seems to have been especially fascinated by its primordial element, the inhuman image of eternal nature. Corbett insisted that his images not be understood as landscapes in the literal sense; rather, they were intended as poetic renditions of imagined or remembered experiences in nature

And here’s Corbett:

I have no intention or desire to illustrate the nature around me; my wish is to express some quality of experience in relation to nature, some quality of self-awareness, deriving perhaps, paradoxically from the responsiveness to a vastness and inhumanity of environment. The painting of a particular mountain in order to represent its geological uniqueness, or even its special beauty and grandeur, would not interest me . . . Rather than to choose the mountain or any other specific fact of nature, grand or small, as my subject in painting, I myself prefer to be chosen.

Corbett worked from memory rather thank photos as I do. Either way it’s about the aspects of nature that resonate with you than the specifics. I suppose that there are any number of landscape painters that might say the same, except that they also enjoy the challenge of trying to represent the local colors, at least some of the recognizable specifics of the moment. I very much enjoy the work of the Canadian figurative artist Heather Horton, but find it a bit confounding when she refers to rendering an awkward wall color behind a sitter. I think why not pretend that the wall was painted green instead of white, who would know.

So rather than painting scattered stones in a shallow creek as they are I start by trying to echo some of the naturally occurring aesthetics of that moment and then depart from them in order to enhance them in a more considered design. Hopefully anyway.

Edward Corbett

As I mentioned previous I recently enjoyed reading about the Abstract Expressionist Edward Corbett. In the late forties and early fifties he felt that praising the importance of the psychology of the artist over the art itself was resulting in ugly paintings. And while there was a lot of context for this ugliness, the war, existentialism, damaged emotional psyches, etc, that it would be much nicer if artists still painted beautiful paintings. Guernica is about an awful event but it’s still a beautifully achieved painting. In his words, “there is enough ugliness and neurosis in the world without putting it down on canvas.”

So Corbett’s call to action was to make abstractions that were beautiful. Rather than saying that since Ab-Ex was blazing a new trail it could ignore and vilify the history of art, that it could still incorporate it. Just because it was a new type of expression didn’t mean it was exempt from the long held principles of aesthetic design. Whether you think figure painting is dead in the present doesn’t mean that Rembrandt isn’t still beautiful.

From the Corbett monograph by Susan Landauer:

Corbett strongly disapproved of the concept of Action Painting, agreeing with Reinhardt that “any painter peddling wiggly lines as emotions ought to be run off the streets”. For Corbett, such intentional lack of discipline was both fraudulent and self-defeating. “Painting is always improvisation because you don’t have the thing already created . . . Rosenberg’s idea is so easily distorted to mean a kind of unconscious, unfocused act or movement with tools on a surface which one hopes or presumes will have some kind of meaning. I don’t think it does. I think random markings by anyone or random actions are the opposite of what leads to art. Art is design. It is intentions, careful concentrations, acute awareness. Art is purposeful. It is not accident.

Which is to say that even if you approach the canvas with a zen beginner’s mind and start slapping paint, later you need to come back to it as an editor. You may have chosen a particular red-violet at random, but now you have to decide what to do about it, leave it, excise it, expand. You have to consider it in context, how do these forms fit together, do these lines move the eye around the canvas well. Since you may not have started with a specific intention you can ask yourself Have I achieved want I wanted to achieve, but you still need to ask What have I achieved and do I like it.

And while I don’t like all of Corbett’s work, I really identify with his imperative. Painting non-objectively and yet retaining some classical elements of design.

the New York School

I recently read a monograph about the (mostly SF based) Abstract Expressionist Edward Corbett. I like some of his paintings, but many veer to close to color field for my taste, or at least to appreciate in book form. Despite my lack of exuberance over his paintings I found his thoughts about paintings, and the analysis of his paintings by Susan Landauer to parallel my own feelings about painting in many regards. I will have more to say about this monograph, but today I wanted to consider my paintings in relation to Corbett’s hate for action painting. He was friends with many of the key New York School, but disliked the idea of emotional improvisation, preferring to emphasize the necessity of design and concept.

While I share some of his sentiment towards action painting, I can’t help but feel that it’s somewhat contradictory to praise design exclusively over improvisation when working in an abstract mode. I think about rhythm and balance when I’m planning a painting, as well as throughout its progress, and I like my paintings to be more refined than gestural, but clearly I do not qualify as classical in any sense. Since I’m not classical in composition or content, I must have something in common with the energy and gesture and improvisational nature of Action Painting.

When I paint I am very unenergetic, usually I am sitting, and there is as much time spend blending the marks I’ve made as making them. The most movement I engage in is walking ten feet away to examine the painting from a distance, then walking in close to make a quick brushmark to indicate something I want to change, then pacing back to consider what I’ve just done. The paintings themselves have a fair amount of energy, they sit somewhere between field painting at one end of the spectrum and all-over paintings at the other end. My aim for the past two years has been to make more complicated paintings and by making things complicated some of my paintings do veer close to the “overwhelm you with sensation” of say late-forties Lee Krasner. This gives me some trepidation because I want there to be subtlety and passages of stillness, but enough movement to keep the viewer interested. So I’m not exhibiting Pollack/De Kooning style kinetic energy when painting, but the paintings themselves have plenty of energy.

I also strongly reject the New York School of psychological/emotional mark making. I don’t think I am conveying emotion in my gestures or that the gestural process of painting is revealing me as a person, nor is it a cathartic excision of psychology or experience. There is a wonderful Portland area artist Jolyn Fry whose best work in my opinion are her Bloodlines figure series, which by her explanation were created by meditating on events and emotions and letting those recollections come out of her through color and gesture. I appreciate the results of this method, but I feel no connection to that practice. A slight caveat here that my painting are expressionistic, but their subject is not me. I am painting aesthetically and not emotionally.

And improvisation versus design. Well this is another compromise, though mostly I fall on the design side of the spectrum. I don’t approach a blank canvas with nothing in mind and then proceed to paint the first sensation or explore through automation. I do a fairly thorough mock-up, which is my term for digital studies that I create. But I use the mock-up for at most a quarter of the painting process, then I let the painting proceed on its own inertia. Once the painting starts to gain its own life it usually has as much going wrong as working well, so the middle half of the painting process is about addition and omission. With periodic spells where I stare at the painting and make lots of notes, such as too much yellow in upper third, omit dangling bit off lower left blue form, add more neutral greens, etc. I then spend many hours trying to enact these design notes. By the time I added and edited these notes into the painting, there are a new set of problems to consider.

So I agree with Corbett that the New York School probably got too much respect and for some of the wrong reasons and its dominance in the teaching of art since the fifties has had some unintentional effects on the art scene, moving art away from providing pleasure and allowing consideration by audience, to supporting the artist as being as or more important than his or her art. The artist’s psychology and thematic intention and other things that provide context to the work being necessary to appreciating the work because it doesn’t have enough elements design and enough aesthetic principles to stand on its own. But all of the rhetoric and context aside I still enjoy many aspects of the paintings from the New York School, and find parallels between their work and my own. So I guess enjoy what you can and ignore the rest.

back to work

I’ve finally had a reasonably productive painting week. But it’s still been a couple months since I’ve finished a piece larger than 6x6 inches. I have several that are making significant progress, but the only one that’s really close to being done is one that I previously declared as being finished that I’m reworking. It doesn’t exactly feel like progress. As usual I have plenty of new pieces that I want to start, but with POS three months away I should really be churning out the polished work about now.

is abstract art difficult?

I desire for my paintings to be without message, I am actively trying to remove content so that the meaning is entirely up to the viewer. I feel that in my previous figurative art is was sometimes too easy to dismiss something if it was recognizable. That’s a portrait of Milla Jovovich or even if someone didn’t know that my portrait was of Robert Rauschenberg they could simply recognize it as being of an older man. And having labeled it, having glanced at it and understood its subject, this viewer could move on, could dismiss it too easily. Could disregard the effort of its making, the craft and style of how it was made and portrayed and move on.

Even the concept of titling my work is frustrating to me, should I apply an evocative but meaningless title that will inspire further connotations for the viewer or title them in a more mundane cataloging manner.

My point is that my assumption in not determining the meaning for the viewer is that the viewer will want to determine their own meaning. Or meaning might be too specific a word, the viewer will interact with the piece in their own intimate way whether that be to attempt to label it with meaning or emotion or to accept it as it is. This is not to say that I assume that everyone will like my paintings, I know otherwise. But by not having explicit content I assume that the painting creates a sort of question or problem which the viewer will want to consider.

Somehow I’d forgotten the flipside to not giving an explicit meaning is that it requires slightly more effort. Yes, it’s true that a viewer can recognize ‘Hey, that’s a painting of a cat’ and then having recognized the subject move on, but it is equally true that approaching an abstract painting and not recognizing a subject they could choose to dismiss it without any further effort on their part. My assumption is that if I remove the subject the viewer might pay attention to the craft, quality, style, color, etc of a painting, but the same viewer who wouldn’t notice these qualities in the cat paintings because they understand the ‘Oh, cute kitty’ will also not notice these qualities in the abstract painting, except they won’t say cute, they’ll say ‘I don’t get it’ or ‘Just a bunch of blobs of paint’ or ‘I could do that’ and on and on. Which is to say assuming anything is a pointless endeavor.

I mention all of this because I recently donated a painting to an auction. I then received a phone call from the woman organizing the auction, who after having identified me as a donator asked “What is this thing?”.

She was perplexed with my painting and I was perplexed with her reaction. I said something to the extent of “It’s a painting. Oil on wood.”

Afterwards I went through the scenario that could lead to someone calling an artist who has donated a painting to your auction and not only saying What is it, but calling the painting a Thing. A “Thing”, as in This is not a landscape, therefore it is not a painting, what exactly is this Thing. So I thought, okay this isn’t strictly an art auction, it’s a general auction, with gardening tools and quilts. I know that the auction has ceramics, but in other contexts this could be defined as a craft or as functional art. And it could be appropriate to call abstract art non-functional, as in it doesn’t do the work for you, it doesn’t provide a service, you have to meet it halfway, you have to interact with it.

I’m so embroiled in art history, galleries, and my own little world that I’ve momentarily forgotten that just as much as some people don’t get paintings of cats and velvet clown paintings, but love paintings by Clyfford Still, there are other people who not only don’t get abstract painting. And some might not even put in the effort to dislike abstract painting because they don’t want to understand.

So complaining that people don’t appreciate the Mona Lisa or Starry Night for the right reasons is pointless. Aside from the fact that saying right reasons implies that my opinion and perspective have primacy over someone’s else; something which my beloved Spinoza would chide me for.

So I need to reframe some of my thinking. The backstory spin I’ve put on my abstract work as a reaction against obvious subject matter is fine in some contexts, but it’s pointless to think that anything I do wouldn’t be dismissed by half or more of its potential viewers. The relevant thing is that at one point I was replicating reality with technical skill and now, though I’m not exactly expressing myself in terms of a world view, I am expressing myself by merit of being a conduit, the paintings emerge from my taste, my tendencies, my awareness. So I have shifted from simply replicating, to not having a specific goal in mind, simply interacting with and taking a journey with every painting. And this is considerably more fulfilling for me and hopefully more enjoyable for some.

moving

Finally finished moving stuff out of my old apartment and cleaning the apartment so that it can be shown and hopefully rented (letting me out of my lease early). The closing of my house, moving and cleaning of apartment have taken up pretty much all of my time for at least three weeks. So I now find myself 17 weeks away from the open studios and I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much in the last two months. I understand why I haven’t accomplished much, the moving plus three weeks of concentrating on writing, leaves two or three weeks of painting productivity accomplished. But the fact that I know where the time went doesn’t make me any happier that it’s gone.

And really what I should do for the next couple weeks is write, but the weight of everything artwise that is pragmatically possible to do, let alone all that I would like to do is heavy. At the moment it seems like I’ll only be able to finish the paintings that I’ve already started. And while there are several of these that feel promising, I am, as I have previously mentioned, always looking forward.

And my studio is an hour away (by bike and Max) from my house, which makes the studio fairly obsolete or at least inconvenient unless I plan on doing mucho hours on a given day.

All I need to do is paint. Why is that so difficult.