On Seeing

"It is harder to see than it is to express."  Robert Henri

There is probably little argument that one of the biggest challenges facing a painter is to see the subject in a way that will allow him or her to translate the vision into the two dimensional space.  Too often the mind carries preconceptions that are attached to images, and thus, when we sit down to paint the tree before us, often we end up painting the tree that is in our mind, the tree we first drew as children - big solid brown trunk, round green leafiness.  It takes effort to focus enough to see the changes in tone, to detect slight temperature differences, or to recognize that some lines are lost and blend into another element.

I have spent months of study trying to acquire better vision for painting, and I recall moments when suddenly it became clear to me: driving down the freeway I would marvel at the tonal changes in the passing trees, the delicate differences that made them real; I witnessed how dark were the areas of wet pavement, how sky-like the flections.  I imagined mixing the color to match what I was seeing.  This seeing went on for miles, almost a hallucination of sorts, though I assume hallucination to mean seeing something that is not there, rather than seeing what is there but what most people don't really see.  But like driving while hallucinating, it was probably not the safest way to navigate a vehicle down the highway, and I try to do it less, unless I am alone on a long straight road.

But trying to see has become an exercise I work on frequently, and though I have lately been caught up in business that does not allow me the time or leisure to paint, I thought that on my latest trip I would take along my sketchbook and use the idle moments for some drawing.  It did not happen.

I found myself in southwest Iowa in mid-March, and I was surprised that winter still dominated the land; it was cold and bleak, with no budding trees, no spring flowers, no green to be found.  At first I tried to think of a word that would best describe the color I saw, and the closest I came up with was "dun".  A very bland, dull color, sapped of life by the hard winter.  Undulating fields of cornstalks chopped off near the ground, dead and beige and unremarkable.  Every little farm had its silos, iconic in a way, and I thought they might make a good subject.  But as I drove I found there were few places to pull off the road, no public parks or areas set aside for recreation: do Iowans just drive like hell through the snowstorm and get where they are going, all business and no pleasure?

At any rate, I tried hard to turn on my "vision" and found that it was unavailable to me.  For the life of me, I couldn't see the beauty that I was certain surrounded me.  I took a few snapshots as a record of my journey, but I was surprised by how uninspired I was.  Perhaps it was a reaction against the lingering winter.  More likely my mind was too preoccupied with another sort of vision, a seeing for the truth in numbers, a cataloguing of physical properties of the real estate I was investigating.  The demands on my vision were great - "see" as much as possible in a very short time, and there was no room left for shifting the vision to the other sort required for painting.  I think the resources of the mind are limited sometimes, and yet I was surprised by how little choice I had in the matter.

Upon my return I pulled up my photos from the trip, and with a little enhancement the richness of the colors jumped out at me: there was color there all along, and I had been unable to see it.  I hope that in future trips I will be able to see it while there, but in a sort of apology to the beauty that is Iowa, I present at a minimum these photographs as a testament to color.

Two Writers

It has been a long while of no painting at all, and I miss delving daily into the Art Spirit, attempting expression, trying to learn the basic skills of value and temperature and composition and line.  I didn't want to stop; in fact, it feels as if a part of me has been imprisoned and is doing hard time, marking the days on the wall of the cell.  Life has intruded and work demands my attention in a way it hasn't in several years, and I am surprised to find that my brain has switched into a gear that does not allow for Art.  All hands are on deck for other kinds of thinking, analytical and exacting and fixed, and there is no impulse to create, nothing but the drone of numbers.

Finally I had to insist that I take an hour, a brief respite in which to squeeze out some paints and quickly scribble out something, anything, just to free those cramped muscles for some exercise.  Those very few of you who actually wander into this blog to see what I may have been dabbling at will know that I enjoy trying for passing resemblance in small portraits, and here are two more dead writers, with a small scrap of their work to accompany:

Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu'as-tu donc ce matin?
Tes yeux creux sont peuplés de visions nocturnes,
Et je vois tour à tour réfléchis sur ton teint
La folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.

Le succube verdâtre et le rose lutin
T'ont-ils versé la peur et l'amour de leurs urnes?
Le cauchemar, d'un poing despotique et mutin
T'a-t-il noyée au fond d'un fabuleux Minturnes?

Je voudrais qu'exhalant l'odeur de la santé
Ton sein de pensers forts fût toujours fréquenté,
Et que ton sang chrétien coulât à flots rythmiques,

Comme les sons nombreux des syllabes antiques,
Où règnent tour à tour le père des chansons,
Phoebus, et le grand Pan, le seigneur des moissons.

My poor Muse, alas! what ails you today?
Your hollow eyes are full of nocturnal visions;
I see in turn reflected on your face
Horror and madness, cold and taciturn.

Have the green succubus, the rosy elf,
Poured out for you love and fear from their urns?
Has the hand of Nightmare, cruel and despotic,
Plunged you to the bottom of some weird Minturnae?

I would that your bosom, fragrant with health,
Were constantly the dwelling place of noble thoughts,
And that your Christian blood would flow in rhythmic waves

Like the measured sounds of ancient verse,
Over which reign in turn the father of all songs, 

Phoebus, and the great Pan, lord of harvest.

(from les Fleurs du Mals)

Then one afternoon - the rain had stopped but the clouds had not broken and it was turning cold again - it was about dusk and we were galloping along an old road in the river bottom; it was dim and narrow under the trees and we were galloping when my mule shied and swerved and stopped, and I just did catch myself before I went over his head; and then we saw the thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb.  It was an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet.

(from The Unvanquished)

Winter Scenes

I've never painted a winter scene with snow before, though I have admired them for years, and have wondered about the subtleties of warm and cool colors so near white that they make us see the snow folding over the landscape.  After a hike up Gales Creek in the coastal range, I thought I might give it a try; I was struck by the muted colors in the stand of alders along the creek, the hazy background forest, and the vibrancy of the moss in the soft light.  This is more like a preliminary color study, trying to find values and temperature contrasts to see if I like it as a painting, but it seems that I need to find a way to avoid painting all those trees as they fade into the background.  Either that, or I need to acknowledge that this might take quite a while, and is not something to be attempted standing out in the cold.

John Carlson, of course, was a prolific painter of snowy landscapes:

Is Indigo Blue or Purple?

color study, 7x7

I took the puppy for a walk this morning, hoping to wear her out so I could have more time to do the things I'd like myself, and the sky to the west was a deep, rich blue that I would call indigo, though when I searched the web for definitions, I was surprised to find many people who believe that indigo is really nearly purple:

I have always thought that indigo was a deep blue, slightly toward the red scale, the name derived from the natural dye used on the original Levis.  More like this:

Needless to say, my color sketch didn't quite catch a true indigo, either.  Working from my fast-fading memory of this morning's sky, I veered a little toward Prussian blue and not really fully Ultramarine.  Maybe cobalt would have been a better place to start.  Still, the quick sketch managed to catch something of the mood of the tree line on the crest of the rolling field.  I think I ought to assign myself the task of gathering visual memory on my morning walks and then committing it quickly to color studies, in order to improve the feeble memory that operates now.

Kayaking the White Salmon

White Salmon - 24x30 oil

Working from a decades-old black and white photo printed on copy paper, I tried to introduce color in a way that maintained the feeling of cold beauty.  Flowing water is a tricky thing to paint, since any competent boater will be able to tell when it is not true to nature; the most important skill is being able to "read" the water, knowing where to place yourself so you end up where you want to be down river, using the map printed on the surface of the moving water.  

The Artist at Work

For no apparent reason, I thought I would take a look at artists working in their studios.  Maybe I'm just trying to work up enough motivation to get in there myself.  It's pouring down rain and will continue to do so for at least another week, a sleepy puppy is at my feet, needing a walk, but not in this rain, and it seems like a quiet, dead time in December.

So if you are interested, bored maybe, see if you can identify all these fine folks at work:

Compared to this, my studio is spotless.

Runner up in the messy studio contest.

Steinbeck

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.” 
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I've always loved Steinbeck and his love for the common man, his connection to the earth and the simple truths.  He lived in a different time, and his preference for individualism (as noted in the above quote) seems very American, in both the good and the bad ways, but he also believed in the social contract, the rights of man and something much bigger than just the individual.  And then again, he was also a really good story teller.  I went through a period in my youth when I probably read every thing he had ever written, including journals and letters, but that was so long ago that it is probably time to revisit his best pieces, like The Grapes of Wrath, or some of the warmer, funnier ones, like Tortilla Flat.

This painting was started a little differently, for me, with no drawing at all, no checking to see if proportions were right: I just slapped down some thin paint and blocked in a rough head, simple masses, then worked the darks and then the lights to try to place facial features.  I wouldn't say it is a perfect likeness - I think Steinbeck's face was meatier, fuller, craggier.  But it caught enough of a resemblance to satisfy my goal, which was to test my feel for laying out a face without much measuring.

Wet and Dry

Lake in October, 12"by24" oil/canvas

The light has changed, the colors are more muted and softer, the details are foggier, but that is the way the lake looks now and this painting was from just before those seasonal changes started taking effect.  In October, the light was still crisp and clean and the atmospheric distance was more pronounced.

But for a little diversion, I decided to try my hand at a southwestern scene, an entirely different palette, inventing colors to make a copy of an old sepia Curtis photo, Canyon de Chelly from a century ago.  I think it might be fun to spend some time down in Arizona and New Mexico and really see what those colors are like.

Canyon de Chelly, 16x20 oil/canvas

And then of course there is another portrait study from an old black and white photo, someone long since dead, imagining some color in their face, wondering about the personality behind the eyes.  This boy might have been a runner for Western Union or maybe a street urchin, or perhaps both.

12x16 oil/canvas

The Green Leaves of Summer

16x20 oil on canvas

I've had a good run the past few days, with plenty of time for painting, few distractions, and the turn into autumn to spur me on to capture what I can of this fading light.  I've decided to name this painting "The Green Leaves of Summer" because when I shared it with a friend in Carmel Valley, he said it made him think of this: http://youtu.be/1BRqA3DSmpc  Now I can't get it out of my head!

In analyzing this one, I find that there is something about it that appeals to me, and I think it might be that cobalt in the sky in conjunction with the soft greens of the field.  The photo distorts the values somewhat, and the copse of trees on the right is not quite that dark, but the composition does seem to be off balance, though that may be part of what gives the rest of the painting the sense of space.  There is nothing unique about the thing; in fact it feels like I am turning back to old habits of painting what I think a landscape should look like.  But it is honest, too, and came from a quick snapshot I took while driving through the Oregon countryside on my way somewhere in the Willamette Valley.

I spent a little time in the garage yesterday cutting up some scrap 1/4" plywood to make painting panels, and now I have about forty of them in various smaller sizes up to 11x14.  I feel like I am storing up for a continued onslaught, a siege on the World of Art, banging my head against the wall, trying to get in.  Sometimes it feels like trying to do the impossible, like teaching a dog how to use a toilet, but then when I look back at what my work used to be like a couple of years ago, I can definitely see that I have made progress.  Here is a quick study of a Rembrandt from yesterday.  (I need to do some correcting around his eyes, etc. but it was just an attempt to squeak out another sketch for the day):

8x10 oil on panel

And here is something from two years back:

I think this last one is a pastel, but it is obvious I was focused on trying to get some sort of likeness and not concerned about the overall look of the painting.  Why does it seem to take so long to pound these things into my head?  Maybe an old dog can learn new tricks, but it takes a boatload of patience.

Ackerman Island

Ackerman Island, 12x24 oil on canvas

I've been playing with different methods of laying down the paint lately, more smearing around and wiping out, more tonalist in color range, and the finished work above (it's so hard to get good photos with my meager set-up) is moody in much the same way the Columbia River seems to me to be at certain times of the year.  The water is wide and slow and powerful.  The light is clean and soul-piercing, the setting is timeless, and one feels somewhat insignificant in the presence of relentless Nature.  Or at least that is what I was trying to paint here.  I'd settle for moderately interesting.

I was drawn to the light coming through the trees and being reflected in the near branch of the river, and the slender sandy island, dependent on the water levels of the river, and the narrow band of trees strung out down the length of the island.  I drive past this place a dozen times a year, and I am always interested to see its changing moods.