Where I stand on art

Since I have been keenly interested in art since I was knee high to a duck, obviously this is only a brief overview of my views on the matter. As long as I can remember I have been drawing. I had my spaceship phase, my dinosaur phase, my spaceship and dinosaur phase, my beginning perspective phase (lots of train tracks fading off into the prairie), my boat phase (especially one masted sailboats), my World War II aircraft phase (particular the Messerschmidt Bf 109 and the P-51 Mustang), and so forth. As long as I can remember I have loved modern art, and started to seriously study Cubism around 5th grade. I still practice Cubist techniques.

I started oil painting around my freshman year of high school. Besides studies in class, my first painting was a collection of fish, taken from a photograph. Realist stuff. I was interested in Surrealism in high school and started to take an interest in Sacramento's local hero, Wayne Thiebaud. I went through a brief period of being interested in Pop Art, but realized that Thiebaud wasn't really a Pop Artist and that Andy Warhol's work was mostly dumb and ugly. Around this time I was falling in love with Abstract Expressionism, particularly the work of some Northern California painters who seemed to have some really interesting paint handling.

When I was travelling by train through Europe I noticed some peculiar things that happened to the passing close-up landscape. I think that I may be one of the few people who ignored the scenery of the Rheinland to focus on the ground right next to the train. I did some pastel sketches of this phenomenon and put them aside until I encountered the Italian Futurists, who had been doing the same thing 70 years before me. I was completely smitten by the Futurists and spent a year doing nothing but developing these sketches into paintings. I was in college at the time and decided against an art major, because the art department was being taken over by the most banal ideologues who really thought that the purpose of art was feminist, homosexualist, and Communist agitprop.

I took a brief interest in neo-Expressionist narrative paintings and did a series of which only two paintings are not complete doo doo (and those two are partially doo doo). Meanwhile as a musician, I was becoming smitten with the work of two Californian composers: Lou Harrison and Harry Partch. I began reading tons of California history and fiction and began to really look at Richard Diebenkorn (who passed away while I was in college). I was sketching the Central Coast daily (and neglecting the study of Beethoven and his ilk - however my theory professor was a neighbor and knew where I would go to sketch and would "happen" to walk by and say things like "wow. Good sketch. I assume that you have finished the analysis of the Rassumovsky quartet." I would dutifully get the thing done). I had been looking at a lot of Japanese woodcuts as well as Fauvist landscapes, and was applying the ideas from those to the Central Coast landscape, but there was something not quite there.

After graduation I happened upon Susan Landauer's The Bay Area School of Abstract Expressionism published by the University of California Press. It suddenly put a lot into perspective, particularly my own work in relation to Diebenkorn's Berkeley series of paintings from 1955 and 1956. I had been working and reworking a particular view of land and sea from Highway 1 near Davenport, about 20 miles north of Santa Cruz, and had a medium size canvas with the subject that was supposed to be the final painting of it. It was mostly greens and blues and browns: the colors of the actual landscape. Inspired by Diebenkorn, John Grillo, Ed Corbett, and a couple of other painters from the 1950's, I went at the canvas with radically different colors: cadmium red, titanium white, French ultramarine. I let the colors explode with a lot of painterly brushstrokes, all kept in check by conforming to the basic structure of the landscape.

That painting was a turning point for me. I still love to look at it in the studio when I need ideas. From there I have been working with a variety of ideas borrowed from Diebenkorn, Matisse, Bonnard, Seldon Gile, Thiebaud, and others. It has been going well, except that I have felt the need to bring a new discipline to my work, which I wrote about earlier.

One of the recent great discoveries for me was the art of the Society of Six. Seldon Gile, William Clapp, Louis Siegriest, Maurice Logan, August Gay and Bernard von Eichmann were young painters in the East Bay who were taken by the fauvists and applied those techniques to the local landscape in the 1920's. Since they were on the West Coast they were almost completely ignored by the artistic establishment, although they have made a profound mark on painting by inspiring many of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Nancy Boas wrote an excellent book on them called Society of Six: California Colorists, which is also a UC Press book. Since much of their work is in the Oakland Museum, I have had the privilege of seeing a lot of it first hand, which brings me to how I have learned about art.

While I love to theorize about art, I discovered art almost entirely by direct experience with art. When I first fell in love with Picasso it was not because I had any idea that he was trying to present multiple sides of an object simultaneously, flattening the picture plane, etc. I just found something profoundly moving and interesting. This was not a completely subjective and emotional response, as I developed my own theory as to why the paintings worked, it just was not taken from the canon of New York criticism. I have since gone back and read Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg and the lot and have come to one conclusion: they were mostly fools who never took a deep look at a single painting.

To look at Pollock's "drip" paintings and come to the conclusion that he is negating the illusion of depth, respecting the picture plane, etc., is to be an idiot or blind or both. To think that Barnett Newman is an important painter, more important than Diebenkorn in his Bay Area Figurative phase is to be so crippled by the absurd as to hardly be worth talking to.

One of the big problems of these critics is that they have represented the side of various schools of painting incorrectly and have had a monopoly in academia. So when a middle to low brow like Tom Wolfe takes on modern art, he is really taking on New York (dare I say New Haven?) official criticism. The problem is that neither Wolfe, nor the critics who upheld the art really looked at the art with any depth whatsoever.

So, with that background, here is where I stand:

I like art, from the beautiful abstract cave paintings of France to the glorious frescos of Giotto and Piero della Francesca to the work of Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn. I like the humorous when it is married to solid structure (Robert Arneson or Claes Oldenberg for instance), but I have little time for hip, post modern "irony" (which is really an abuse of the word). I like making art, I like looking at art, I like talking about art, I like theorizing about art. I believe in objective beauty, although I recognize that it is always filtered through our subjective experiences.

I completely reject the notion of "progress" in art. Sure, some painters influence many other painters, but to say that the later painters are more advanced is hogwash, and part of the mania for the novel that has infected our culture for the past 250 or so years. I consider all great art experimental. If art is not experimental it is formulaic, and that is an error in any period, any style, any genre. Motherwell was no more daring than Watteau, in fact when the dust settles on the 20th Century, they will be seen much more as brothers than Watteau and Eakins (who was doing something different, although just as beautiful).

All art is abstract, even photography. The question is what to distill from the natural world and how to distill it. Don't tell me that Rembrandt was not abstract or I may ask you to show me the real world in those colors! Imitation of nature is a great tool for developing structure and keeping one's art from becoming formulaic. In my most abstract expressionist periods my sketchbooks will always show unceasing studies of the landscape, the figure, the object. In fact my strongest abstract works have come out of the most meticulous studies of the real world. When I feel the danger of formula lurking, my natural reaction is to take my portable easel and head outside.

Artists sometimes make misleading statements that should not be considered lies, but should be examined critically. Clyfford Still denied all sorts of external influences in his work, but a careful study of his better paintings reveals that he was first and foremost an abstract landscapist. In a rare moment he was caught off guard and admitted as such, but for the most part he would rant about internal demons and the sublime and so forth and so on to anyone who would listen.

I believe that artists must learn and hone their craft. Picasso would not have been the great cubist he was had be not mastered draftsmanship. Diebenkorn would not have been able to pull off the magnificent tension between order and collapse in his Berkeley paintings had be not been thoroughly in command of his brushes. Sometimes an artist has such good ideas that he can overcome poor technique, or he may have such a strength in one aspect of technique that he can compensate for a weakness in others. At a slide lecture Wayne Thiebaud stopped on a Van Gogh and said, "it's a pity he never learned how to paint, but he sure could draw with a paintbrush!" Still had poor technique, but in the few great paintings he did, the idea carried him. Milton Avery was a feeble draftsman, but he could create atmosphere like nobody else.

Good technique can only somewhat mask formulaic ideas, however. In 100 years Wyath will be forgotten. Same with many of the neo-Realists who trumpet their art as the restoration of sense in art. You want a good neo-Realist? Look at Lucien Freud or William Bailey.

New York is not the center of the art world, and was rarely as important as it makes itself out to be. Art goes to New York to retire in a museum, it rarely happens there. The New York school were for the most part precious imitators of automatic surrealism until Mark Rothko went to San Francisco and learned how to do something exciting. When he got back to New York he dragged Clyfford Still (also from SF) with him. They called the art that happened in this period the New York School, but the best practitioners had extensive roots on Chestnut Street on Russian Hill. Almost all of the art done in New York since those days has been minor, with a few exceptions.

In 100 years London and San Francisco will be seen as where the excitement was. I have been impressed with modern English painting until recently. They have, unfortunately, bought into the dicta of the New York art czars and their work has declined to the lowest level. The same thing has happened in the Bay Area, where the local establishment still looks to New York for leadership, ignoring the fact that in terms of creativity, the Bay Area has been ahead for a century. However, there is, in the words of the late Thomas Albright, "a tradition of the cantankerous and contrarian" in the area. We will survive the current silliness, and I can even suggest where to look for the leading lights of tomorrow.

Los Angeles is overrated as a cultural center, and Cal Arts (a Mickey Mouse school, if ever there was one) is almost totally useless in terms of fine arts. Los Angeles has produced some great art, and will continue to, but will always have much less than it should, given its population and the creative industries there. Sacramento will continue to provide fertile ground for up and coming painters, who are close enough to San Francisco to see some good examples from the past, but far enough from the art clique to follow in sheepish submission to whatever new idea comes down the pike. Portland should also be a great art center, but isn't for some reason. I really can't figure it out, since Portland does so many things so right. Probably because the Oregon Catholic Press is there, and the hideousness of their publications oozes by osmosis into the minds of the Portlanders. I don't know.

The question of Europe is a sticky one. All easel painters are European artists, whether they like it or not. America is a part of Europe. The day it looses its Western European identity is the day that it falls apart completely. I see Italy as the first nation to come to its senses and rejoin the greatest civilization on Earth. Iberia may come along soon after. At some point France may come back to the fold. I see the re-evangelization of Europe and America as the best hope for artistic greatness to come.

I do predict that the new greatness that we are on the edge of will be completely dominated by serious Catholic artists. Avantgardisti fool only themselves when they deny absolute beauty. If someone who labors for hours and days and years to create marginally accepted art he must believe that there is beauty there that transcends the fads of the day. Eventually the leftists in the arts who are serious about art will realize that there is nothing to be gained from the left besides betrayal. The die hards will drift into agitprop and the serious will find Truth where it is most abundant: the Holy Catholic Church. One of the fraternal connections to be made between artists of the last century will be to link the appalling ugliness of Thomas Kinkade with that of Jeff Koons. They will be seen as the opposite sides of the same ugly coin.

Here is an incomplete list of some artists that have been important influences on me (in no particular order). I recommend seeking out their work, particularly in person:

Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Jackson Pollock, Rembrandt, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Titian, Pierre Bonnard, Camille Pissaro, Paul Cezanne, Gregory Kondos, Pablo Picasso, Fra Angelico, Robert Motherwell, Goya, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Robert Henri, Monet, Manet, David Park, the Society of Six, Lovis Corinth, Ed Corbett, Frank Lobdell, Robert Ryman, Alexander Calder, Thomas Hill, William Keith, Franz Kline, Elmer Bischoff, Winslow Homer, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Miro, Matthias Grunwald, Hieronymous Bosch, El Greco, Van Gogh, Seurat, Eakins, Jeffrey Camp, Lucien Freud, Balthus, David, Ingres.

Posted by erik at August 31, 2003 1:00 AM | TrackBack