Rodin's hands...

mark horst, "this living hand no. 3" oil on canvas, 22" x 28" 2012

"There they were, these small graceful dancers, like transformed gazelles; the two long, slender arms drawn through the shoulders, through the slenderly massive torso (with the full slenderness of Buddha images) as if made of a single piece, long hammered out in the workshop, down to the wrists upon which the hands then assumed their poses, agile and independent, like actors on the stage. And what hands: Buddha hands that know how to sleep, that lie down smoothly after all has passed, with fingers adjoining, to rest for centuries at the edge of a lap, lying with the palms facing up, or else steeply raised at the writs, invoking infinite stillness. These hands in wakefulness: imagine. These fingers spread, open, starlike, or curved in upon each other as in a rose of Jericho; these fingers delighted and happy or else frightened, displaying at the very end of the long arms: themselves dancing."

from "Letters on Cezanne," Rainer Maria Rilke

this living hand

"this living hand no.1" 22" x 28", oil on canvas

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

John Keats

horst interview

Here's a little interview I did...

Van Gogh's “magnificat”

Vincent Van Gogh, "The Siesta"

I've been reading a little collection of Rainer Maria Rilke's letters [Letters on Cezanne] and at one point he describes his impressions of Vincent Van Gogh's painting. Rilke says that in Van Gogh: "...something of the spirit of Saint Francis was coming back to life...” He goes on to say: “in his paintings… poverty has already become rich: a great splendor from within."

In Luke’s gospel, Mary says this about her baby and about what her pregnancy might mean:

My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden.
…
He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.
  

So here is Rilke suggesting, like Mary, that "the hungry" have been filled--that the poor have become rich, and that this has happened in Van Gogh's way of seeing the world.

Maybe Rilke, Van Gogh and Mary were looking in different places and seeing the same thing.

what does a painting mean?

"espresso cup no.1" oil on canvas, 8" x 10" mark horst

I do hope a painting means something. But it’s alright with me if it’s only a little bit of something.

Don’t come to me with the entire truth.
Don’t bring the ocean if I feel thirsty,
nor heaven if I ask for light;
but bring a hint, some dew, a particle,
as bird carry only drops away from water,
and the wind a grain of salt.*

Maybe the green light around the edge of a porcelain cup is all the meaning I need tonight. Maybe the generous curve of an eyebrow is enough.

*from “Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity: Twenty Poems of Olav H. Hauge” translated by Robert Bly

more on Chardin & Cezanne's fruit

I'm reading Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters on Cezanne," and came across this discussion of the fruit in Chardin and Cezanne:

"[Chardin's] fruits are no longer thinking of a gala dinner, they're scattered about on kitchen tables and don't care whether they are eaten beautifully or not."

Isn't that just great? Because there are certainly fruits out there--in say, this painting by Coenraet Roepel--that are aspiring to being eaten beautifully:


But not Chardin's humble fruit:


Rilke continues:
"In Cezanne they cease to be edible altogether, that's how thing-like and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness."

Yes! I like this much better than Hockney's analysis. It's not that Cezanne's fruit is closer [see blog entry below], but there is something "indestructible" about it--a "stubborn thereness."

Rembrandt's hand

Weschler interviews Hockney:

“'And what,' I asked, 'so captivated him in Rembrandt?' 

'The hand!' he replied instantly. 'The evidence of a human hand moving. I could feel his elbow jutting, the way he balanced and rebalanced his pen between his fingers, adjusting and readjusting. Every mark, visible. The boldness and yet the economy of means. The precision and yet the liveliness of gesture of observed and rendered gesture.'

'...The Chinese say that painting draws on three things: the eye, the heart, and the hand. And I longed to return to the hand.'"

I think David Hockney is wrong about this...

“Look at that basket of fruit by Chardin over there on the left [top], and now at the same subject by Cezanne… Chardin’s version, for all its indisputable mastery and beauty, feels far away; it’s a picture of fruit at the far end of an optical remove, receding into the picture, whereas Cezanne’s… feels right up close; those apples feel close at hand, they feel present to hand, they come out to us. That’s what you can achieve when you break from the tyranny of the optical.” [David Hockney, quoted in Weschler, p.184]

I like Hockney a lot. And I certainly don't know what paintings he was referring to when he made the above comment. But given his argument [that Chardin is subject to the "tyranny of the optical"] it shouldn't matter which painting it was. Hockney's saying that Chardin's paintings all work in a way that removes us from the subject, whereas Cezanne sees and therefore paints in away that brings the subject close---makes it present.

I like Hockney's argument, but I can't see it and so I have to say, I think he's wrong. What do you think?

how we actually see

Mark Horst "What have I become? no. 1" oil on canvas.

Hockney, speaking about his photo collages: 

“I realized that this sort of picture came closer to how we actually see, which is to say, not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses, which we then build up into our continuous experience of the world. Looking at you now, my eye doesn’t capture you in your entirety, but instead quickly, in nervous little glances… There are a hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And that is wonderful. If, instead, I caught all of you in one frozen look, the experience would be dead—it would be like… it would be like looking at an ordinary photograph.”

from Lawrence Weschler, “True to Life: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with David Hockney,” p.10

memory and seeing

David Hockney, "Arnold, David, Peter, Elsa, and Little Diana, 20 March 1982

“Working on these collages… I realized how much thinking goes into seeing—into ordering and reordering the endless sequence of details which our eyes deliver to our mind… Which is to say, memory plays a crucial role in perception. At any given moment, my eyes catch his or that detail—they really can’t keep any wide field in focus all at once—and it’s only my memory of the immediately previous details which allows me to form a continuous image of the world.”

[from Lawrence Weschler, “True to Life: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with David Hockney”

p.20]