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 ben 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]

looking and beauty

"I’ve always loved that phrase of Constable’s where he says, 'I never saw an ugly thing,’ …It’s the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.”

David Hockney

turning embrace no. 7

oil on canvas. 24" x 24". 2012

let painting be suggestive

"I do not believe that art should be explicit. It should be suggestive and ambiguous so the viewer has to enter in.”

Balcomb Greene

let the picture lead you

Helen Frankenthaler, December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011


Speaking of pictorial choices, Ms. Frankenthaler said that her decision-making process was wholly unregimented. ''There is no 'always,' '' she said. ''No formula. There are no rules. Let the picture lead you where it must go.''

Graham Nickson on pictoral space

Notes from a New York Studio School drawing marathon in 2008. I find Graham Nickson's way of thinking about space to be so helpful. Here is a tidbit from one of the daily crits:

Let’s focus on 2 drawings: both treat the figure as part of a landscape; one’s an urban landscape, one's a pastoral--but we're traveling over the form, traveling with the charcoal, the charcoal becoming one with the experience of traveling.

Notice the dialogue between surface space and the geometry of depth. Here [referring to the drawings] we travel more slowing through the drawing because we have to swim through the water before we get to a solid object. She’s thinking about space.

Here we have strong surface geometry, but here shape is not describing form. The form is not held firmly by the space around it, not conceived by the pressure around it

Make the space hold the form!

Don’t let the deep space lead you out of the drawing! If you invite your friend to dinner and they come in the front door and walk out the back door—you won’t be satisfied with the evening. You want them to walk around, look around, sit down, rest, eat, talk.

So in the drawing you want deep space to bounce us back. Cezanne always taps us on the shoulder and reminds us that this is a drawing. He brings us back to the pictorial space so we don’t leave by the back door.

Here the shapes call us through the space; whereas here we stay on the surface. Dark marks have to keep their position in space. In other words don’t let them go into galactic space—these dark marks make a hole

Here we’re getting a crowded space, but not a relational space.