Can I Have An Amen!

Just a short posting today (with a little help from the great Spanish painter Francisco de Goya).

I'm spending most of my time painting these days, but during a short break today, I managed to read a few more pages of my "Spanish Portrait" exhibition catalogue. This thing is a gold mine. It seems every time I pick it up, I come across something else inspiring and right on point with my work. The most recent excerpt that rocked my world came at the end of a discussion about the developments in portraiture with respect to the royal courts from the 16th to the 18th century.


Author Javier Portus references Goya's portrait The Family of Charles IV (posted here) to emphasize "the pictures and written accounts of the Spanish and European courts with their highly significant mixture of intimacy and spectacle." (p 46)

..."...highly significant mixture of intimacy and spectacle..." Amen to that.

Show Me

I've decided to start hoarding images of my new work for awhile. Suddenly my work has taken a big leap forward and I've been thinking that it would be best to unveil the new paintings as a group, as a - dare I say it - body of work. Today I had a studio visit from a fellow artist, and it was so reassuring to have an artist whom I respect so much confirm to me that, after producing more failures than successes over the past six months, I have actually managed to make real progress in my work. It feels good to see that I'm beginning to gather some momentum - with a little more confidence, a lot more clarity, and frankly, much better paintings.

But sorry, no peeking yet (not that I'm not anxious to show you). It kind of feels like I'm getting ready for a ball, even though I haven't yet received an invitation to the party.

Slow Dancing

I always think I can do more in one day than I can. I set big goals (finish 5 paintings in six weeks) and little goals (complete 4 shards of the blue painting by Monday) and even smaller goals (no lunch until the eye is finished), and yet I generally find I am so much slower than I expect to be, than I want to be. I often envy painters who seem to be able to crank out work with abandon. But as I began to blog about in August (see August 4 , 2009 posting entitled "Slow Art"), I think there's a compelling argument to made for the value of taking it slow.

This week, I began a new painting, and several other paintings are waiting in line to be started. The conditions are ripe for a hyper-productive painting marathon. I'm so excited about the new works I've planned, I almost can't wait to see them in paint - I want to paint faster, sleep less, ignore the phone, cancel my dates, finish as quickly as possible. And I'm doing much of that. Except for painting faster. Once I have the paint brush in hand, there is no moving quickly - I immediately shift gears from being enamored with the image to being enamored with the surface.

It is true that you can pick at a painting too long, sucking the life out of it by fussing. The brushwork can get too tight, and the color can begin to muddy, especially with oil paint. But there's a lot to be said for continuing to work the surface, finding more complex relationships among the forms, more subtle shifts of tone, more surprising hits of color than would have emerged from a first or even second impulse. In my work, the changes that I play with are all pretty subtle, but every small shift makes a difference. Just when I think it may be time to move on, suddenly the paint reacts in a way that makes it that much better. And then I think I should stay a little while longer. Maybe something even better will happen next. Of course, sometimes the magic does strike early, and it is only with fresh and patient eyes that I don't act too hastily and destroy it. Ultimately, the magic happens when the paint is allowed to take the lead. It is left for me to watch carefully for its cues and respond with grace.

Soul Searching

Last week, I threw up my hands at trying to explore or even reconcile all of my ideas at once, and decided to focus for awhile on the aspect of my work that deals with portraiture (I've posted a few classics of the genre here - by Velasquez, Singer-Sargent, and Klimt). I had been frustrated at the small number of paintings I had completed in the last couple of months (despite endless hours in the studio), and I felt that narrowing my options would help me move forward more quickly. Ironically, the decision has helped me in ways I didn't expect - rather than narrowing my practice, it has actually begun to bring all the seemingly disparate pieces together. And now the mish-mash of paintings that I've been contemplating these last many weeks suddenly make sense as a whole - as that dreaded "body of work". It seems the last couple of months have been more fruitful than the meagre number of recent paintings might indicate.

This latest development occurred to me while reading the first few pages to the catalogue from a 2005 exhibition at the Prado Museum entitled "The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso" (and lord, what I would have given to see that show!!). Describing the history of portraiture in Spain, the author raises a few key points (key for me, at least, since I would argue that these issues that relate to the historical portrait are still applicable today in many respects, albeit in more subtle and complex ways):


1.  The portrait's early connection to the wealthy and powerful, "who used the greatest artists of their time to propagate their own image", where "portraits were more concerned with the attributes of social or professional status than with individual identity.

2. The portrait's association with idealizing certain modes of behavior and glorifying individuals of a certain "...'quality' who were worthy of imitation".

3. The importance of indicators of wealth or status in portraits, including the sitter's clothing/fashion (I am aware of at least two books discussing this with respect to particular artists: "Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt's Paintings" by Marieke de Winkel, as well as "Whistler, Women and Fashion" by Margaret F. MacDonald).

4.  The tense relationship between fiction versus reality in image-making.

And I only read up to page 25. And although it's all just about the portrait, the themes that I've been addressing in my work are all there. Which gives me a new-found confidence that I am on the right track. And all those (new and improved) paintings that I've been planning are finally ready to go. Giddyup.

Focus Girl, FOCUS!

I have been out of town all week, trying to remain productive by choosing new images and working on compositions for future paintings. After trolling through a million images and experimenting with a hundred different ways of working with them, I have decided that I have to just stop and focus. And paint. I could plan new paintings until the end of time, but that won't get me very far. So I have chosen to concentrate on portraits for the next couple of months, and leave my other ideas aside for the moment. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the work of Chuck Close - his merging of the idioms of photography and painting, his reliance on the portrait, and his ability to straddle the worlds of abstraction and representation.

Painting by Chuck Close

I've also been thinking about the work of Shelley Adler - her large scale portraits are so beautifully painted, bold and yet sensitive to her subject's particular character.
 

Painting by Shelley Adler

Her paintings seem to capture a tender moment of vulnerability, providing a touching antidote to Close's restrained, analytical approach. I'd like to think my work offers (or, I should say, is beginning to offer, or aspires to offer) a combination of these approaches - the rational with the sensual, addressing the artifice of the image while exploring the human frailties hidden within.

Work That Body

I guess it's a good thing. But it's starting to feel a little unproductive. I work tirelessly on composing new paintings, then I build the stretchers, stretch and gesso the canvas, sketch the composition onto the primed surface - and then I should be ready to go. But too often, after staring at my source material for too long, I realize that I can make a better painting, that the composition can be stronger, more interesting, more complex, more subtle, more dynamic...and so I go back to the drawing board. I keep working through the ideas that are coming fast and furious, but I don't have a whole lot of paintings coming out of the process. At least not yet. I'm trying to be patient, knowing that my ideas are progressing and trying to reassure myself that it is better to have discarded many sub-standard plans than to produce multiple sub-standard paintings. Although I have my share of failed paintings in the trash as well.

One of my biggest challenges right now is confronting the demand for a so-called "body of work". I'm getting frustrated by the constraints that phrase implies. I certainly don't want to produce a random group of paintings, but how many different variations can you explore before it's just indecisive? And yet why would I make 10 paintings based on one approach when after two or three paintings, I think of some new approach that could be better?

Oh - and by the way, I came up with a new approach today. Scrapped two planned paintings. Start the new plan tomorrow.

God help me.

Hallelujah!

Never underestimate the power of thinking out loud - especially with an awesome friend who can catch the one big idea that actually means something amidst all of your chatter.

Today, a fellow artist visited my studio, and after weeks of working alone in the studio, I had no fewer than a million ideas in my head screaming for feedback. As I began to fill the available time with my random, urgent thoughts, I detoured on to various explanatory tangents, and...WAIT! What did you just say? My patient listener stopped me in my tracks. It appeared I had stumbled upon one of those big ideas that makes all the rambling little stuff make sense. And now it's a whole new world...

In the past year, my art has transformed dramatically, and I have understood this new direction to be grounded in my interest in images and the experience of viewing. But I have never really adequately explained my choice of the particular images I have chosen to work from, other than what have been fundamentally aesthetic (and occasionally art historical) explanations. But my choice of images is critical. What I was finally able to identify with clarity today is that my interest in images is not merely as images, but rather is rooted specifically in images that represent a cultural fantasy of self-actualization, a fantasy steeped in narrow, idealized notions of beauty, wealth, and power.

I had been moving in this direction with my increasing focus on issues of glamour. I recently began to read "Glamour: A History" by Stephen Gundle, in which he argues that the notion of glamour is an historical phenomenon that grew from the social mobility created by the Industrial Revolution. Simply put: glamour was never truly glamour until it was aspirational.

And if my life has been about anything, it has been about aspiration. Ambition. Desire and disillusionment.

So much more to come. I have just begun to scratch the surface.

Without Shields

Today I came across an article about a naked photo of Brooke Shields, taken when she was 13 years old:

"The original – authorised by Shields's mother for $450 – had been taken by a commercial photographer, Gary Gross, for the Playboy publication Sugar 'n' Spice in 1976. Shields later attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress the picture."

The artist Richard Prince photographed the image and it was chosen to be included in the Tate Modern's recent exhibition on pop art. The image has been challenged as obscene by the London police (and has now been taken down by the Tate curators), and it has provoked lots of discussion on our current notions of obscenity (interestingly, the image has been publicly displayed without controversy in the past). Only the top portion of the image was printed in the press, of course, but I find the fragment disturbing enough. It's like a sexualized pageant picture, taken inside a sleazy motel. The naked body, unseen in this cropped version of the photo, seems superfluous.

One aspect of the story that fascinates me though (beyond the obscenity/censorship issues) is the lack of Shields' consent in the display of the image - not from a legal point of view, but from an artistic point of view. Forget the fact that her mother consented to such a perverse image being taken of her daughter for a Playboy publication. What goes through the mind of Richard Prince when he chooses to perpetuate the photo's display, knowing that the exploited child, now grown, does not want the image exhibited? What if a rape had been photographed as part of the commission of the crime - would those images be fair artistic game? Even if they could be legally, should they be? Would it matter whether or not the raped woman consented to the artistic use of the images? Should it matter? The images of the people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center towers of 9/11 have generally not been published. Jonathon Safran Foer included a similar image in his book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", but he took pains to note that although the image was based on a real photograph,the image published for the book had been digitally created. No victims were exploited for artistic purposes.

I think of all the images that circulate on the Internet now - millions of personal, intimate, embarrassing, startling, revealing, horrifying images. For artists, it is a treasure trove, a little shop of horrors. But the more artists work from images, avoiding the confrontation or relationship with the people who inhabit those images, what is lost in the artistic translation? Or worse, do artists become participants in the process of dehumanization that so many of us are trying to overcome?

In my artist talk at Daimler Financial recently, I brought in the two paintings of Elizabeth Taylor that I had just completed. One participant asked me, "What do you think Elizabeth Taylor would think of these paintings if she were to see them?" The implication was that she may be offended or horrified by the disfiguring distortions I had imposed on her image. And while I admit I had not thought of the issue before (due to the obvious unlikelihood of the event), without hesitation I acknowledged that her opinion would in fact matter to me. I would want her to see that I was not trying to caricature her in any way, but rather seeking to find an expression of a deeper humanity lost in the artificial glamour of the original photograph. I would hope she would like it.

I know that sentiment is generally seen as anathema to the conventional artistic credo of "don't give a fuck" - but I'm not convinced of its universal value. I am certainly not advocating any attempt to please anyone in an artistically castrating kind of way, but there has to be some validity, if not value, in respecting the humanity of the person behind the image. There is obvious artistic value to exposing the ravages of our cultural psyche in images such as Richard Prince's photograph, but these images do not only function as mirrors of our culture. For those trapped within the image, they are mirrors of individual souls, exposed, vulnerable, for all to see.

Not The Same

My latest painting: 45" x 33", oil on canvas (no title as of yet)

Untitled, 45" x 33", oil on canvas, Amanda Clyne

Technically, my process is to (1) take a photograph, (2) turn it into a type of painting that (3) I photograph, and then (4) turn into an actual painting, which (5) I then photograph in order to show it to a remote audience. And yet, the point of my work is largely lost when not experienced in the flesh. For me, the work of art that I produce is complete after step 4. Step 5 is merely out of necessity (and desire) to share my work with more people. But the experience of the painting is so different to this digitally distributed image - the scale of the work to the human body, the sensuousness of the oil paint, the warmth of the light and color, the varying views when close up or far away. So much of the experience is lost when re-converted back into a photographed image. I always want a constant disclaimer on my photographed work: " It looks different in real life." Real life. If more people see work as a photographed painting on a screen, is that not the "real life" with which I am forced to contend? Do paintings have a greater significance as paintings or as photographs of painted images - and if so, must we paint for the screen experience rather than the human experience, or is there still value in anticipating and working toward a physical confrontation between viewer and painting?

My Sesame Street Theory

"...an encounter between persons and forms [is] in truth an encounter between persons - the maker and the receiver." (from Susan Stewart's "The Open Studio")

That was the opening to my first artist talk that I delivered to employees at Daimler Financial on Thursday. It was an amazing opportunity to reflect on the developments in my art and life over the past few years, and share my passion for art. It affirmed to me once again that being a viewer of art is in itself a creative exercise, and that the experience of art is a dynamic conversation, and hopefully connection, between artist and viewer.

The employees' response to the talk was amazing - the best compliment for me was that they appreciated how "accessible" I was. We talked about how a lot of artists try to build an aura of artistic "genius" by deliberately making themselves inaccessible. It is as if "accessible" in the art world has come to be synonymous with "mediocre". (I began to discuss this idea in my earlier blog posting "Over-Exposure".) But every time that I speak to people who love art and yet don't have a background in art and art theory, I am constantly struck at how much they want to understand more, and how remote the world of art seems to them. Does it really have to be that way? I work hard in my own practice to engage with the more complex ideas that the experience of art raises, but I am cautious to not make the visual experience of my work alienating. I want those viewers who are not necessarily familiar with the references and theories that I'm grappling with to still be drawn in - seduced - by the beauty of the image, the sensuality of the paint, and the ambiguity of the distortions. I think of it as my Sesame Street theory of art - I want my work to connect with "the kids" just as much as "the parents". Because until relatively recently, I was one of "the kids" too.