resisting the intelligence, almost

Wallace Stevens said, "poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully." What does that mean? Maybe it means that a poem is more than a collection of images that can be translated into something we might call "the meaning of the poem."

I would like to say something like that about painting: that a painting must resist the intelligence--the urge to explain the image--and that it must do this "almost" (but maybe not completely) "successfully".

So a painting might allow for any number of "explanations." It might invite the intelligence in and then present it with many puzzles.

you walk out

"When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out." — Philip Guston

pitcher with pears

12" x 16", oil on canvas, 2010

Graham Nickson on Cezanne

"For Cezanne the tension of forms colliding in space is what the universe is about. He’s discovered how negative space puts pressure on the positive shape. Form and space is about the tension between forms. Think of it like a blueberry sitting in a bowl of yogurt. The yogurt holds the blueberry in place and because of the yogurt, it’s more volumetric." [from my notes at the NYSS Marathon, winter 2008]

JMJ no.4

forget everything

An account of Chardin's conversion:

"One of the first things he did was a rabbit. This object may seem of slight importance; but the manner in which he wanted to do it made it a serious study. He wanted to depict it with the greatest truthfulness in all respects, but at the same time tastefully, with no overtones of servitude that might make its execution dry and cold. 

He had never attempted to paint fur before. He realized that he should not paint it hair by hair, or reproduce it in detail. 'Here is an object which I must aim to reproduce', he said to himself. 'In order to concentrate on reproducing it faithfully I must forget everything I have seen, and even forget the way such objects have been treated by others. I must place it at such a distance that I cannot see the details. I must work at representing the general mass as accurately as possible, the shades and colors, the contours, the effects of light and shade.'"

from, "Chardin: The Unknowing Subversive?" by Pierre Rosenberg

check this out!

Vivante--the painter's blog

the wrinkled old woman and some words from Robert Bly

“My main thought is that we, being so worldly, so informed, so flooded with motifs from the past, find it more and more difficult to allow any object, whether a snowstorm or a toad or a painting, to… reach the soul.

“The job of the writer [or the painter!] …is to give us a frog or a giant or a snowstorm and to protect it from all the invisible forces that want to delay it, elaborate it, relate it to correct opinions, prevent it from arriving at the soul…

…we recognize that Rembrandt is able to bring the wrinkled face of an old woman right up to our soul.”

Robert Bly from his introduction to “The Best American Poetry 1999”

brothers no. 3

brothers no. 3, originally uploaded by Mark Horst.

strategies for wrecking paintings no. 3

There are lots of ways to keep a painting from getting overly teachy. Mediocre painting tries to say too much, leaves no room for the eye to move. And so when I see the teacher getting the upper hand as a painting is developing I think about doing something bad.

Francis Bacon used to throw paint at his paintings, just to see how something completely accidental might improve things. I prefer painting outside the lines: letting the brush have some freedom, letting it dance around the canvas. That beautiful green on the door frame is also right up there next to an eye brow and there under the chin. Why not. Here's a painting where the brush did it's dance:

Here's a painting by Ann Gale--whose paintings remind me of the Swiss painter, Giacometti: