As you'll see by the previous entry, I've wrapped up the art history blog, but if you'd like to see what I'm working on with my artwork and schedule of exhibits, then please visit my website. Thanks.

This week marks one year since I started this blog. I began with the intent of plugging some of the gaping holes in my knowledge of art history, and I feel that while there is still so much to learn, the holes aren't quite so gaping. Tempus is fugiting as far as time to paint goes, and so in order to be able to devote more time to pushing the paint around, I've decided to wrap up this project. So this last one today will be it.

Just read a really long piece by Russian-born artist Olitski describing the incredibly long time it took for him to break into a gallery. (Of his appointment with dealer Betty Parsons years ago, he recalls the assistant saying, "Oh, she must have forgotten. She's gone for the day."

Finally, he got his foot in the door when he made up a story about a persecuted Russian artist who had painted these pictures - would the dealer (Alexander Iolas) please take a look? Iolas proclaims him a genius but insists on meeting the artist. Olitski has no choice but to tell the truth. He got his show.

Here's one I like for its rich layering, called Third Day, acrylic on canvas, 2000. Since I'm trying to create richer surfaces and experiment with color, I'm finding out how hard it is not to have some of those colors just go flat or come forward too much. Somehow there is both tension and harmony here, don't you think?



Above left at top is a print by Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, Untitled, 1950. Included it today for its balancing theme and ghostly character.

Thank you all who've visited, commented and lurked.

Tomato, tomahto. . . how about Brancusi ? If you're like me you have been pronouncing it incorrectly for years - just learned it's pronounced Brancoosh- and it's Romanian, not Italian. He left Romania early in his life to study and work in France, but evidently he never really stopped creating art that had its touchstones back in Romania.

In Writers on Art, the British novelist Paul Bailey talks about how Brancusi "revivifies the images of rural Romania - the Byzantine icons, the wayside crosses and altars, the 'death poles.' (p. 257)
(About those death poles which I'd never heard of - apparently Ceausescu bulldozed quite a few village graveyards, destroying many - but they point toward the sky and signify the soul of the deceased on the way to heaven.)

Above is The Kiss. Maybe he got the idea for the theme from Rodin because he worked in his studio for two years at the beginning of his career. There are a number of versions of this. This particular one was carved in 1907 and adorns a grave. (Many of Brancusi's early commissions were funerary monuments.)

Bailey feels that given the sculptor's Orthodox background, he probably saw death as a part of life, and did not feel it needed to be sentimentalized or glossed over. The man and woman are carved out of rough stone, and certainly do appear to be united (even codependent). Reminds me of Cycladic sculpture in its simplicity. What do you think?

So many artists are lauded for their ability to simplify. But it is so hard to do well. Look how perfect this Sleeping Muse is. Just enough detail. Just the right size (6 x 11 x 7). Amazing.

I'm sure I'm racking up overdue fines, but I've been hanging on to a book, Writers on Artists, that has paired writers with artists, each writer taking a few pages to talk about an artist. Today, sitting in the 55 degree summer weather at the neighborhood pool I had plenty of time to read about Chaim Soutine. You probably already know that he did not live a very long life.*

Now that I've talked about how great this book is, I'll complain that there is a seam running right thru the painting, and all kinds of searching online proved futile in finding another version of this painting, Man Walking the Stairs.

Can you make out the painting? Here's what English poet, Tom Paulin, (who grew up in Belfast) has to say about this painting:

. . .the stairs are outside in a stormy garden where they seem as wile and as bent as the trees an Gogh or Kokoschka would've recognized which isn't to say it's at all a secondhand garden only these trees are ecstatic dionysiac deeply unsettled oil and ocher and deadened raw. . .(page 289)
(I have yet to paint a dionysiac tree; best done under the influence?) He goes on in to talk about how the trees almost resemble a mob which "turns all those swirls into street action . . .

Of course, there's much more than I can include here. We'll never know what Soutine's intentions were, but here are Paulin's thoughts in free verse about the man who is "hunched or contorted in some way" and

has he his hands behind his back like a prisoner?
so maybe he is taking a last look over his shoulder?
-it could be the Bridge of Sighs then transposed to nature?
though of course a garden is more than nature
just as the Bridge of Sighs is more than a stone opera
just as the man climbing the steps or the stairs is more than a man climbing
in the year nineteen hundered and twentytwo
-like a prisoner or a refugee this man's been told - walk!
and everything - storm trees oily shapes colors
everything in the painting is unhappy is coerced
or coercive
except within it the spirit of the painter that represents
the man
almost as though he's the Wandering Jew who has been
ordered to act the part of a felon
desperately treading a treadmill in a circus tent
that a big wind blown into rips and tatters

*Soutine was born in Lithuania in 1893, managed to study art over the objections of his family, went to Paris where struggled to paint and live, working to dig ditches. A wealthy American collector, Albert Barnes, noticed his work, bought several paintings, and helped him climb out of poverty. During the WWII he managed to hide with the help of friends, but his lover, Gerda Groth, was captured and sent to a concentration camp. They never saw each other again. He died of an illness in 1943. (Writers on Artists, foreward by A.S. Byatt, 2001)

Monday's post included a sculpture by Bernar Venet that I came upon in a magazine. He joins the long list of sculptors I knew very little about. The challenges of sculpture, of course, are the same as with painting - what to do when it's all been done?

In an essay he wrote in the seventies, Venet discussed the philosophical underpinnings of his work:

For Venet, there was an overabundance of nonfigurative and figurative imagery in the visual arts. Indeed, he thought that they had been done to death, and that the only way to rescue art from itself, from entropic redundancy, was by basing it on the mathematical graph- which for (Jacques)Bertin was the only true monosemic image. It is a completely rational model, Venet wrote, arguing that art must become "solely a place of manifestation of a code." (ArtForum, February 2003)

ArtForum's Donald Kuspit continues: Is it correct, then, to consider Venet's sculptures and drawings in this exhibition as illustrations of this code and, as such, conceptual? Are they a kind of applied mathematics? Not entirely. Each of Venet's "Arcs," 1976- (not included in this show but see image below), is a measurable segment of a circle's circumference, usually accompanied both in the title and work itself by the mathematical formula that "describes" it. But Venet also makes "Indeterminate Lines," 1983-, which he regards as "free" and "not definable mathematically"-thus wittingly subverting his own premises, as though to signal that rendering a code artistically is implicitly irrational. . . . .the graph line becomes convulsive and eccentric, seeming to lose its bearings. It becomes playful and unpredictable. . . . Indeed, it becomes a grand gesture-an eloquently dramatic expression of space. As Venet says, "randomness is one of the rules of the game," which produces at least the appearance of absurdity, "freeing sculpture from the constraints of composition."

Above intederminate line (rolled steel, 1994). Here are Arcs from the 2009 Venice Biennale:



If you go to his website, you'll see that he provides both a brief and a detailed biography. Naturally, I went for the brief version, but there were so many tantalizing tidbits that I had to go back and read the detailed version.

Here are a few: "Creates a ballet, Graduation, to be danced on a vertical plane" and later, "decides, for theoretical reasons, to cease producing art."

The bare bones are: born in France in 1941, is incredibly versatile and following the hiatus from art, works in a wide range of media: painting, sculpture, soundwork, furniture, and photography.

I'm always very wary of anything that seems gimmicky, so I was kind of surprised to like the 15- second video sound piece that pops up automatically when you click on his website. Sounds like church bells; makes you want to be part of the action. What do you think?

Over the past few weeks several people have asked me to include a little more about what I'm working on, so here goes. Above is a detail from a painting I'm still struggling with. I'm interested in playing with ideas of and obliteration and erasure. I've always loved maps and history, so I've been looking at the idea of how places can be wiped out and then papered right over, or built upon, and then others go on about their business with no idea of the destruction beneath their feet. But of course some people do know, and do remember, and so that must alter their feelings about the place.

Above is the corner of Holmes and Reva in Cerritos, California. I used to drive past it on during the late 1986 after an Aeromexico plane came down, wiping out 10 houses, damaging a lot of others, and killing a total of 83. First the debris was cleared up, then there was a big dirt lot for awhile, and finally, after I didn't seem to be driving that way anymore, big giant houses when up to replace the more modest 70s ramblers surrounding them. And now, if you go to Realtor.com, you can see that one is for sale for 950K. I'd be surprised if there was any mention of the history of that plot of land. And would it matter to you? Would you feel as though you were buying a house of spirits? Does what you don't know really not hurt you? (Do I sound like Carrie Bradshaw trying to be Isabel Allende?)

Anyway, with the boon of Google maps, it's possible to drop in on places we remember that have been altered, that carry some memory of fear or horror, and see what the look like now, after the events/construction/activity of a few decades or a few centuries have obliterated their appearance and rearranged the atmosphere of the place.

Do you have places you recall as especially interesting or powerful? Were they meaningful only after you read about the history of the place or did you have an instinctive response to the place before learning its past?

P.S. If you'd like to read more, there's a short LA Times article written 10 years after the crash. I found it interesting that almost no one agreed to be interviewed and those questioned told the city they did not want any commemoration of the event. Only one family of those who lost relatives stayed in the area (and that family is interviewed.) All the others left.

A friend from LA who comments often on this blog sent an article I've long since misplaced but still recall comparing Agnes Martin to Georgia O'Keeffe and coming down squarely in favor of Martin (feeling that O'Keefe was too kitschy).

Her work is always spare and often based on clean, geometric grids or simple lines across the canvas.

Here's Stars. Although it looks like a graph at first glance, I like the fact that the color is not uniform but shifts subtly throughout. The edges looking almost like fabric, and the tiny grid pattern and border are not uniform either. Looks like small stitches across the bottom near her signature. All those human touches to alter and soften an image that might have looked machine-made reveal the hand of the maker.

Trolling for information about her, I came upon a video created in 1997. Even if you only watch the first two minutes, you get a sense of her clear and simple approach to painting: get out of your own way, be still and wait for inspiration to come to you, and then paint. She shuns anything that seems to be too intellectual, preferring an emotional response. (Her hair is pretty no-nonsense as well). She died in Taos in 2004. I was surprised to learn she started her college career at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, my husband's hometown and the city where "my" gallery is. Not a ton of artists jump from Bellingham to Columbia University, and not too much later, a solo show at the Whitney.


Here's another, entitled Falling Blue (1963). Have you seen her work in person? Somehow I don't think the feeling of harmony and ability to be mesmerized can really come thru on a tiny computer screen. With Falling Blue, you get a tiny sense of the shimmer and beauty of this; like the other, it looks like fabric. (Some of hers are silk screen, but the SFMOMA website does not describe the medium for this, so I can't tell.)

In the video interview, she talks about having given up meditation once she mastered the ability to empty her mind. To me, it looks the work of an uncluttered mind. (No plastic Barbie toys underfoot on her floor.)

Finally, while reading about her I stumbled on a photo of Bernar Venet's sculpture Indeterminate Lines, rolled steel, 2003. Why do I like this so much? Seems a two-person show of Martin and Venet would be just the thing - hers so uniform and controlled, his so bent and moving and weighty.

In yesterday's NY Times Sunday magazine there was an intriguing article discussing an art theft blog - did you see it? It's run by a fellow who goes by the name Turbo Paul. As Virginia Heffernan reports, he is "a self-described former dealer in stolen antiques" but now is on the other side, digging and blogging to track down and help recover stolen art.

One of his blogs, Stolen Vermeer, is devoted exclusively to reporting on the two decades-old investigation into the recovery of works stolen in 1990 from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The other blog, Art Hostage, tracks a number of art thefts worldwide.

This passage from Heffernan's article provides a feel for the insider nature of Turbo Paul's blogging:

. . . Turbo Paul knows everything about cops and robbers -- or seems to. Sure enough, by May 22, he was proposing what the Paris heist (of May 20th) meant; who was sending signals to whom; who was humiliated by the heist and who had the last laugh. He said his blog was besieged by visitors with prestigious IP addresses, and when I asked, he passed on the routing information of his readers: Justice Department, State Department and F.B.I." (p. 20)

It dawned on me that maybe we should hire this guy to start looking for Osama Bin Laden. . .or figure out how Lance Armstrong is getting away with doping, or exactly what happened with the Gores.

Above left is one of the stolen paintings, Woman with a Fan (1919) by Modigliani. (I was not familiar with that painting; the shapes seem to work together so well, with the rectangle in the top left balancing beautifully against the shape of her ear and the tip of the fan.) I think you will find these blogs pretty entertaining. No attempt to be politic, circumspect, or balanced. Refreshing.

Just noticed that in today's NY Times (C1) there is a review of the memoir Priceless: How I went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures. The author, former FBI agent Robert K. Wittman, features prominently in Turbo Paul's blog posts, since he's the undercover agent who was hot on the trail of the works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Read the review here.

Just finished reading an interesting blog post from May 31st about Sargent's Daughters of Edward Boit at this link (Alchemist's Pillow) so I've been thinking about how difficult it is to capture a likeness, especially with just a few strokes. This is Two Women by Iraqi painter Faik Hassan.

Others have pointed to Bonnard and Picasso as artistic influences (see Art, edited by Robert Benton, p. 273), and that makes sense to me, but what I am amazed by is the ability to nail down these portraits with a few tones and a few swipes of paint. I've been struggling this morning with a face for a commission, wiping it off, starting over again, and so on, and then I open this book and see these two.

Well, he did win a scholarship to go to Paris during the 30s and study at the École des Beaux Arts. (That little piece is missing from my backgound, alas.) Upon his return to Iraq, he established and led the painting and sculpture department of the Institute of Fine Art. In addition to landscapes and portraiture, Hassan also created a large mural in Tiran Square as one of a number of projects he worked on to serve his country. He died in 1992.

Here's one I like from the Dijla Gallery.

Unfortunately, the title is not posted, but it is oil on canvas. Monochromatic scheme works for me, and besides, I've always liked nun paintings. Time for a shrink?

I'm just not clever enough to tie in Memorial Day with some work with war imagery.

Even though I've lived in Washington state for a total of almost 13 years, I feel as though I barely know the names of the leading artists here, many of whom are still alive and painting. While thumbing through a book on NW painters I came across George Johanson. Apparently, when his left Seattle he was only 17. He came to the Portland Museum Art School from Seattle in 1946 on an art scholarship awarded by Scholastic Magazine. Aside from trips to Paris, Mexico and time spent studying in New York, he never really left, teaching for 25 years at the Museum Art School and developing a career in painting and printmaking.

I've never really gotten too excited about Surrealism, so when I read that he felt drawn to it, I thought, hmmmm, oh well. But look at this above- isn't it colorful and interesting? (The seam down the middle is from the book's spine.) I really like the strong use of negative space, the bent perspective, the repeated curves, unexpected colors. What do you think?

Here are two more and they seem to be coming more from an abstract expressionist interest, don't they? This is Western Exposure:

Trying to identify just what it is that I like about these. Maybe the combination of very small and very large, strong simple shapes, maybe the foreground figures that are just suggested.

This is Mirror Window. Below it is one that's from a gallery exhibition this year, called Nude with Mirror. (Here's a link to the Mark Woolley Gallery in Portland, as well.) What do you think?

I've always liked the chalkboard-like paintings of Cy Twombly without really understanding what it was that drew me in.

In a book that does an interesting job of choosing writers to talk about artists, Philip Hensor (The Spectator and other British newspapers) discusses Twombly's work and offers his view that "obliteration is always intimately connected with writing in Twombly. . ." (p. 137, Writers on Artists, DK Publishing, 2001)

The writing is "on the teasing edge of legibility; but falling off that edge, rather than clinging on. . . They are not the writing of a teacher communicating with his class. . . to borrow a phrase from Barthes, the degree zero of his paintings, which wipe out meaning like a classroom duster, which obliterate writing so thoroughly while evoking it. . ."(p. 137)

I think I agree with Hensor that Twombly's paintings are more powerful when they do not bear too explicit a meaning. Here is the Hero and Leander triptych.
In the first, Leander drowns.

In the second and third, only the waves after the drowning are depicted.


The dark area of the second must be the spot where he went under. Hensor feels the third is the most beautiful; it's kind of hard to get a feeling for the sense of open space and merging of sea and sky in the third one when the image is small on the screen here.




In any case, I think maybe Hensor is right that more "backstory" doesn't really add to this; the interest in his work draws from its inexplicable nature, don't you think?

The Untitled piece at the top is from 1967. This Hero and Leander group dates from 1984.

He is still working and painting at age 82, taking his work in new directions.








This last, The Rose (2008) is from a show last year in London at Gagosian Gallery. He works big, so this would cover a large space on the wall. Have you seen his work in person?

Sometimes a work of art is so familiar you don't really look at it very closely, and then when you do, you realize you never really looked at it that carefully in the first place.

Reading Kirk Varnedoe's A Fine Disregard, I came across an interesting essay on Rodin's Burghers of Calais. He's a little hard to summarize because he always supplies quite a lot of background and context, but I'll do my best:

Varnedoe says that Rodin did nothing to hide the artificiality of his art. Joint lines show and marks of modeling are not hidden in any way. He often made up scores of "spare parts" he used to put together figures: hands, feet, knees, etc. "Such physical, literal instances of sculptural fragmentation and repetition in Rodin negated basic conventions of wholeness, illusionism, and narration.. . In one way of thinking, it is precisely this split between content and form that makes Rodin's work modern.

With the Burghers of Calais, Rodin took a medieval story familiar to all schoolchildren of the time, of how six citizens volunteer to be sacrificial hostages to an English king in order to end of long, wartime seige. As Varnedoe explains, "Dissatisfied with the old conventions of summing up such a story in one hero or rhetorical gesture, he decided that, to get at the truth of what happened, the monument should treat all six equally. To do that, he tried to "imagine the moment of commitment when the victims prepared to march out to what seemed certain death, decomposed the even, conceptually and practically, into the smallest bits." (p. 133)

"He studied not just every man, but every arm, every hand, and even every finer, as an individualy entity, in order to build up an atomized repertoire of discrete units of expression."

Making sense so far? So he has this "lavish palette of recombinant possibilities" and what does he do? Something strange. I never noticed this til now, but two of the figures have the same head, and a third has that same face, only slightly altered. The same fingers appear on several figures, and when Rodin put the whole thing together he did nothing to try to link them by gestures or glances. They are also all sitting on different bases, but their heads are all level (when a more common set-up would have been a pyramidal arrangement).

Varnedoe makes his case that Rodin's decisions stem from his conception of the meaning of this event. These are people caught in various stages of unresolved inner struggle, trapped in private agonies of regret, isolated from one another as they search their minds. But the recurrent parts, suggest that these victims are also part of a collective, and so interchangeable and similar in certain ways. Of course the monument also calls to mind the struggle between the sense of public duty at war with the individual's own private will. (p. 138-9)

As usual, Varnedoe has a LOT more to say, but I think this is enough to get a feeling for his thoughts on how artists play with possibilities, in this case fragmentation and repetition, and from this trying out of forms in new contexts, find new ways to model the world.

I guess maybe all these plastic Polly Pocket and Barbie parts on the floor here at home could find new uses, but new meaning? Not so sure about that.

I don't think it's always wise to look for the personal details of someone's life to show up in an artist's work, but it's kind of tempting with Artemisia Gentileschi. (No, she was not a butcher or anything. . .who's that contemporary chef/author, Julie of Julie and Julia fame, the one who wrote a book about butchery?)


Here's Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-21). Apparently this portraitist and painter of religious scenes depticted this as many as six times. According to Dr. Robert Belton (Art, p. 248), Gentileschi was trained by her father and heavily influenced by Caravaggio. She follows his lead with strong lighting and a deep, black background.

Here's Caravaggio's from 1598, and what some critics have called a rather hesitant, squeamish Judith shrinking a bit from the task. Her maid looks rather up in years, especially compared to the stronger, younger maid in Gentileschi's version. In Art, Belton mentions an additional reason for the artist to focus on such a gory scene; as a 19 year-old Gentileschi claimed she was raped by one of the artist's in her father's workshop.


If you don't recall the Biblical story, here's a summary. In the Old Testament, the Jewish widow, Judith, saved the city of Bethulia from siege by the Assyrians by adorning herself and venturing into the enemy camp to gain access to the Assyrian general, Holofernes. He invited her to a banquet intending to seduce her, and while they were alone at the feast, Judith took advantage of Holofernes' drunkenness to decapitate him, and returned to Bethulia with his head in a sack. The Jews saw Judith as a virtuous heroine, but Klimt portrays her as a Viennese femme fatale. (from Wet Canvas)

It does seem as though you're yanked into the present day with Klimt's version. It's just arresting in its power, don't you think? You are drawn instantly to that face, but when you take a second to see those fingers, the picture has even more impact. Honestly, though, I don't think I would have looked at Klimt's as carefully if I hadn't seen Gentileschi's and Caravaggio's first. What is your reaction?

Sometimes I'm casting about for an artist to talk about and find one really close to home - my friend Christopher Harris creates his art with a pinhole camera - these are long exposure photos made with a lens-less camera. They have a moody, intriguing blurred quality that takes them away from realism toward Rothko country (that's kind of to the north of Marlboro country, minus the carcinogenics). As he explains, "His landscapes and seascapes are meditations on transcendence, a quality Americans have associated with the West for two hundred years."

His latest series will be exhibited at Lisa Harris Gallery in Seattle beginning June 3rd. They are part of his Skagit Series focussing on twilight views of abandoned boats, winter trees, and other shapes barely visible in the fading light. (You'll have to go in person; I have no images yet to post.)

Above is Canola Field. This was taken in Nez Perce County in Eastern Washington.

And here's Rodeo, taken with a small, pocket-size camera, left intentionally with this grainy, scratched look. I'm not sure why, but I seem to prefer images that require some scrutiny, that are not easy to assess with a quick glance.


I really like the movement and the spontaneity of this one. Living in the Northwest, I think gray has become my favorite color by default or osmosis.

I like the way pinhole photography magically reduces the world to its simplest elements of color and shape. I don't know enough about it to figure out how many decisions are still left for the artist. Do you know?

I've had this Klimt book for ages but never really bothered to read it, preferring to just leaf through and skip the text.

The other day while the girls paddled around the pool at the health club I took a few minutes and learned a few things about the progression of his work.

At left is Portrait of Fritza Riedler (1906). I don't know about you, but it always seems interesting to me to trace the trajectory of an artist's work.






Here is the Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstien.



This is thought to be a transitional work between the rather traditional kind of portrait he'd created with Portrait of Sonja Knips. As Maria Constantino points out in Klimt, at first glance the portraits don't bear much resemblance to each other, but each does have the same triangular composition as well as "a certain tension, expressed. . through the hands." I had not noticed those hands, but they are indeed clenched, not very Sargent-like, lacking those soft, loose brushstrokes.



One of the more interesting things Constantino points out is the halo/crown kind of decoration Klimt creates around Fritza Reidler's face. She suggests the idea for this came from Klimt's study of Velasquez (apparently on display in Vienna at the time). Remember that Lady Gaga hairdo on Maria Theresa of Spain (1652-3)? You'll have to scroll back up to see the decorative treatment Klimt creates around the figure's head in the first two portraits on this post. Just jumps out at you.


I worry so much about avoiding any kind of borrowing of other artists' ideas, but here's another instance of taking an idea, and carrying it in a new direction. Alfred E. Newman and I should relax.

Clipped an article about Frank Auerback so long ago I cannot find it in my not-so-organized studio. He came to mind after looking at those highly-textured Joan Brown paintings of last week. (I saw one recently at SAM here; the pigment must have been nearly an inch thick.)

Anyway, I have no idea how Auerbach voted in the recent election, but he certainly must have seen plenty of rounds of governmental musical chairs over the decades. Although not quite a household name here, is well known in Britain for his rich surfaces and his penchant for building up and scraping off layers to get what he's after.

This is Rebuilding the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1952). I love those colors, so hard to make rich and not dull and drab. What do you think?

He found his first painting subjects literally right at his feet. He recalled the time after World War II when the English were rebuilding the vast sections of London that had been bombed out during the Blitz:

“London after the War was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountains and crags, full of drama… and it seemed mad to waste the opportunity and not to take notice of the fact that there were these marvellous images… all around one”.

There was, Auerbach says, “a sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city… and a sort of curious freedom… I remember a feeling of camaraderie among the people in the street”. For Auerbach, the sense of survival must have seemed particularly profound. He had been sent to England from his home city, Berlin, shortly before his eighth birthday and the outbreak of war. Both of his Jewish parents were killed in the concentration camps and Auerbach made London his new home. (from the Courtauld Gallery bio)

This painting was his first, painted when he was only 21 years old, entitled Summer Building Site (1952). Evidently he labored over some paintings so long that the buildings had been completed and opened for use by the time he finished his work.

He studied art at St. Martin's as well as the Royal College of Art in London. His later works include portraits of friends as well as cityscapes. He is still living and working in London at nearly 80 years old. Pretty inspiring, don't you think?

Since spending time with Joan Brown's paintings, I've been looking at some of another Bay Area Figurative artists work - David Park. (He was one of the earlier group that included Bischoff and Diebenkorn; Joan Brown was considered part of the second generation.) At left is Bus Stop (1952). That small figure to the left of the word "coach" just holds those two areas together like a staple, doesn't he? I like the simplicity, the limited palette, the occasional curve to break up the verticals. What do you think?

Here's one you could go see if you're anywhere near the Hackett Freedman Gallery. It's called Nude with Striped Rug.




This one seems to have a whiff of Matisse about it, doesn't it? Also makes me feel a little better about my hips. . .maybe time for the gym.

This is a self-portrait by Joan Brown, one of the second generation of Bay Area Figurative painters. I have a tattered magazine copy of this hanging near my easel; it's hard to tell here, but the eyes are very interesting - different colors.

I like her use of color, strong negative shapes, that sort of chopped off shoulder.






Why is this Green Bowl (1964) so appealing to me? Maybe it's the texture, the two shades of brown inside the bowl, the wandering edge of the bowl . . .it does seem to be a descendant of Cezanne's aesthetically, doesn't it? Has that same interest in things as objects to contemplate rather than to use.



I think sometimes you can go nuts trying to search around for just the right subject, but Brown painted her family, household objects, and sometimes included symbols that held meaning for her. One more - obviously had a sense of humor. Take a look at this one called People and Eye Trees in the Park in Madrid (1961).



Sadly, she died at only 52 in an accident in India that happened during the installation of one of her art pieces.

Quick - how long ago was this painted? 5 years ? 50 years? 90 years?

Well it's a John Marin from 1926 Mt. Chocorua #1.

Not many major artists of the day were working in watercolor, I don't think. (Sargent comes to mind, but he died in 1925.) After studying art in Philadelphia, in 1905 he left for Europe and stayed for six years, no doubt taking in the work of Cézanne, the Cubists, and the Fauvists.

A few important connections made a difference is his work becoming known. Stiegletz learned of him thru fellow photographer Steichen, and the former exhibited Marin's work in his studio and made introductions for him to others in the art world. Art collector Duncan Phillips was taken with his work, describing him as both an impressionist and an expressionist, "because he could capture a moment and location as well as his subjective response to it." (from Phillips Collection bio)

Marin is quoted as saying: Painting is like golf; the fewer strokes I paint, the better the picture. And that's the trick isn't it . . .which strokes?? Takes a lifetime to figure it out!



Above is Brooklyn Bridge (1912).

Here's another from this series, also 1912, that I like even better with its strong diagonals and sense of movement, a feeling for the high energy city and the structures being built.

His use of line is so good, isn't it? Doesn't seem tacked on, but absolutely right and necessary. What do you think?

"The world of proximate things. . .exists for Cézanne as something to be contemplated rather than used." Meyer Schapiro

How about just a little more time spent thinking about Cézanne this morning before dismantling the still life of apples and oranges in my kitchen to make lunches? It's astonishing to me that once you have a new way of looking at things you can see so much more. Above is Still Life (1883-87).

Art historian Meyer Schapiro talks about the contemplative, detached stance that Cezanne takes and how that can be seen his approach to still life:

Cézanne's still life is distinctive through its distance from every appetite but the asthetic-contemplative. The fruit on the table, the dishes and bottles, are never chosen or set for a meal; they have nothing of the formality of a human purpose. . . .Rarely, if ever, do we find in his paintings, as in Chardin's, the fruit peeled or cut; rarely are there choice objets d'art or instruments of a profession or hobby. The fruit in his canvases are no longer parts of nature, but though often beautiful in themselves are not yet humanized as elements of a meal or decoration of the home. (Only in his early works, under Manet's influence, does he set up still lifes with eggs, bread, a knife, and a jug of wine.) (p. 14 - 15, Cézanne, Meyer Schapiro)

Here's Still Life with Apples (1895-8). He's right, don't you think? These are objects to arrange, explore, depict in color to create volume, and so on, not to eat for lunch.

Not at all what Chardin was up to - here's Still Life with Plums (1730).




What's fascinating to me is that Cézanne's contemplative, aesthetic approach to the world of objects extends to his portraits as well. Here's Card Players (1890-2). Off to the kitchen to cut up that real fruit. Please tell me what you think. . . .