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.

Narcissus redeemed

"Narcissus redeemed" oil on linen, 24" x 48" 2011

What would Narcissus look like if he were to stop staring at his own reflection? Most of us confirmed narcissists--among whom I count myself--might find our way out of the narcissistic trap by beginning to acknowledge the people around us.


Antonio Machado--the Spanish poet--suggest that narcissists might ask another person a question and then listen to the answer:
To talk with someone,
ask a question first,
then -- listen.


So here is Narcissus beginning to think about maybe acknowledging the one who walks beside him and perhaps ask him a question.

thank you Steve Jobs...

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

from Steve Job's commencement address at Stanford University

Looking Into A Face

This is the poem from which R. Bly took the title for his collection, "The Light Around the Body." It's called, "Looking Into A Face."

Conversation brings us so close! Opening
The surfs of the body,
Bringing fish up near the sun,
And stiffening the backbones of the sea!


I have wandered in a face, for hours,
Passing through dark fires.
I have risen to a body
Not yet born,
Existing like a light around the body,
Through which the body moves like a sliding moon.

light around the body

I've been using the title "light around the body" for a new series of paintings. I stole this title from a book by Robert Bly published in the early seventies. The book begins with a quotation from the German mystic Jacob Boehme:

O dear children, look in what a dungeon we are lying, in what lodging we are, for we have ben captured by the spirit of the outward world; it is our life, for it nourishes and brings us up, it rules in our marrow and bones, in our flesh and blood, it has made our flesh earthly, and now death has us.

I love this idea of the "flesh" being made "earthly" because it implies that the human body is capable of something more than that. It's as if "flesh" is not necessarily in opposition to "spirit;" as if only this "dungeon" view sees flesh as "earthly." (Interesting, isn't it, that this "dungeon" view is now regarded as the "religious" one?)