represent

Why painting and baseball and golf are alike . . .

In baseball, you don't know nothing.

                         --Yogi Berra

Go Jason Dufner . . .

Due to excessive modesty . . .

A few days ago, I came across a clipping I found, if I remember properly, in the Sunday Times magazine, about four years ago. It’s an ad for a fashion site that baffles me (click to it and figure it out at your leisure), but I was so impressed with the paintings in this ad, I cut it out and saved it. It shows a grid of oil self-portraits, in the manner of Warhol—same pose, same face, same hat, over and over, stacked and aligned like window panes. And yet that’s where the uniformity disappears. Where Warhol would have simply reprinted the same photograph, over and over, but used as a template for different colors, this artist had painstakingly repainted his own face, wearing the same colorful stocking cap, but using different colors, with different backgrounds, different jackets, differentiating each one to the point where it was almost entirely original in comparison with all the others. And you get the same sense of repetition, mass production, but he’s reversed the tension, emphasizing the originality, stressing how much manual labor went into this repetitive act of portraiture, with the hint of mass production an almost sardonic glance back at the intentional emptiness of Pop. I love these paintings, nearly Fauvist, but closer to actual effects of light, with an emphasis on color for its own sake, even though the faces convey exactly what portraits should: a complex inner life, and the evidence of a life lived in a unique way.

Here’s what pleases me most about this image, now that I’ve accidentally stumbled upon it in my studio. These paintings are by a virtually unknown Danish artist, who died in 2008, a year before this ad appeared. His name is Borge Jensen. If you try searching for anything about him on the Web, you eventually come across two websites that reproduce the ad I’ve got in paper form, but mostly your search engine tries to correct your spelling or takes you to links about other people entirely. If you are lucky, and try enough combinations of his name with the words “artist” or “painting” you may get to this link at lauritz.com. Twice when I clicked to it, a paragraph appeared which was, in Danish, a summary of the painter’s life, but whenever I click now, it redirects me to an error page. It’s as if even the Internet wants to keep this guy unknown. I’m not sure he would mind, frankly. One of the times my browser managed to get a purchase on that site and stay on it, I had Google translate it, and this is what I got:

Børge Jensen was a painter, draftsman and printmaker – has worked with landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits. Born and raised in Strib at the Little Belt. After being trained as a painter with his father he sought in the early 1940s to Copenhagen. To prepare for the Academy of Fine Arts, he began at the Academy of Free and Commercial Art at Jarmers place by the painter Askov Jensen and cartoonist Tom Petersen (6 winters).Next, he applied for admission to the Academy in 1946 and was assumed to begin painting school with Professor Aksel Jørgensen in January 1947. Was taught one semester of Vilhelm Lundstrom and followed the teaching of Painting School and the School of Graphic forward to 1955. While such Maria Lüders Hansen (b. 1925) and Knud Bjerre (1921-2005).Study tours and exhibitions have – due to an excessive modesty – only shown a few times, including Strib Idrætsefterskole 1994 and Strib Sognegård “Paintings tells the story” 1996. Attended School trips include to Florence in 1950. stations’ statements Børge Jensen landscapes, still lifes, portraits and especially self-portraits show the artist’s constant search around reflex candles importance and his immersion in the study of mass displacements in space and scale. More photos could call to mind Edvard Weie and Karl Isaksons color.

Wish I knew what “reflex candles” actually meant, in Danish. It’s almost like finding a message in a bottle, tossed into the Baltic, washing up years later on the shore of Lake Ontario. There’s actually almost no information even in this quick bio, but this one passage stood out: “Due to excessive modesty, has only shown a few times . . .” What could be more anti-Warhol? What could be more encouraging and inspiring. To do such great work and rarely seek any attention for it . . . what a tonic for this era.

Happy Birthday, Andy

Andy Warhol’s grave, now streaming 24/7, in Pittsburg

From the The Verge late last night. It may be a while before I take a look. Can’t wait though. It’s next on my list after I get through seven more hours of watching the Empire State Building do nothing and then there’s this film of a guy sleeping for five hours . . .

Buy local

Local art in Minneapolis for members of a cooperative. Courtesy NYTimes.

Works with lettuce. Works with art, as well. C.S.A. also means Community Supported Art.

It takes courage. Really. Quit laughing.

I found myself lingering quite a while last night at State of the Street-ish, an exhibit of street-inspired art at Rochester Contemporary Art Center, in partnership with the Memorial Art Gallery. It’s taken me far too long to get a look at Kurt Ketchum’s work, and I was even more impressed by it than I expected to be. Kurt’s paintings suggests graffiti in a tangential way, yet it’s street-ish because it conveys a sense that the objects he creates are almost ready-made segments of old city walls, covered with vestiges of posters, glue, weathered paint, and the scrawls of urban guerrillas armed with spray paint. The work requires time: you need to adjust to the visual language he’s developed, but the longer you look, the more the paintings draw you in and open up.

I’ve known Kurt for a long time.  I was surprised that the show brought to mind what at first seemed an entirely random set of memories from a 90’s weekend I spent with him and a couple other friends, John Buck and Tom Curtin. The four of us golfed almost non-stop for two days in North Carolina on courses in and around Pinehurst. It was 36 holes a day. One of those marathons. The results were mixed from one round to another, but at one of the courses we played, you could rent a llama for a caddy. (I wish I had a llama story, but we  declined them. Doh! Big hitter, the Lama. Long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse . . . oh right, wrong Lama.) On the last day, we showed up in the morning mist, sleepy, dizzy, hungover and, frankly, intimidated by the first tee at a course called The Pit. It MORE

Rick wins

Hot Summer Sky, Rick Harrington

A well-deserved win of the Harris Popular Vote Award at the 64th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition. Way to go, Rick.

The actual work matters

Harlequin Head, Picasso, destroyed by Romanian woman

There is some truth in this arrogant pronouncement that no one should mourn the burning of art, since most great art now is reproduced and ostensibly immortalized, in one way or another, on the Web. I’ve argued repeatedly here that seeing an actual, original work of art conveys far more than looking at any reproduction. Granted, there are a host of qualifications, especially with photography, conceptual art, and so on. Yet the difference between standing in front of a painting and looking at a photograph of it is roughly equivalent to the difference between meeting an actual person and examining a snapshot of her. What I like in this piece is the insistence on how the value of actually seeing an original painting or print remains an incredibly elite privilege. The total number of people who attend even the most popular blockbuster exhibitions represents a tiny percentage of the world’s population. Yet this doesn’t justify the cynical subtext here that the only people who are really hurt by the loss of an original work are an exclusive club of wealthy and educated collectors, academics and fellow artists. In a statistical sense, it’s true. But to say that all we need are good reproductions misses the fact that the physical presence of a painting, for example, conveys much of what the work offers someone who sees it. The heart of what’s conveyed by an actual painting remains inexpressible and can be captured neither through words nor through a reproduction. For me, it’s where the real power and meaning of visual art resides, inaccessible to analysis. It isn’t about ideas or concepts or an image that can be extracted from the medium used to render it, like the solution to a puzzle. A painting is as much about the humble, colored mud used to create it as it is about what that medium allows you to imagine. And that’s partly why individual, unique works of art sell for such inflated prices. No one would disagree with the assertion that burning paintings is not an act equivalent to genocide. It would be ridiculous to suggest it, but the loss of original works of art is a loss to mourn, at least a little, and what should be mourned most of all is the way in which, over the past hundred years, part of the actual reality, the essence and being, of painting seems to have been obscured, if not forgotten. Which allows people to write explanations for why you shouldn’t care when a Picasso or Van Gogh gets burned.

“Nobody talks about talent anymore . . . ”

Eric Fischl, from L.A. Times

From the L.A. Times, an interview with Eric Fischl, on the occasion of his book, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas:

You write about how the art world became all about the art market after Wall Street soared in the ’80s, and that the art market, which involved conflicts of interest, went on to determine intrinsic value. Can you talk about that?

It was almost like a perfect storm. There was a tremendous amount of money being made by people who were very young, were not broadly educated but were more mono-focused educated. They didn’t have a broad sense of history, of culture. Then all of a sudden there’s this infusion of money into the art world, where they’re looking for things that are not deeply understood but are entertaining, and the lifestyle of it is entertaining. They’re hedging their bets, so they’re buying lots of different young artists. And it’s getting younger and younger. In the ’90s, collectors started to buy work directly out of studios in graduate schools by artists who hadn’t even become professional artists, let alone mature.

And the impact that has on artists is enormous, because if you start selling work as a student, it’s very hard to change, very hard to let go and progress and find your own true voice. So you see a lot of younger artists who’ve been selling work since they got out of school but have yet to do their second show, so to speak. They started speaking, not in art terms, but in business terms. People wanted to know how to be branded, they wanted to know about price points.

Something else that’s continued since then is the growing gap between rich and poor, with the rich getting richer and the middle class, which was your subject matter early in your career, diminishing. How is this influencing art?

It’s an awkward situation for people who make objects because they’re aware that they put them into a system that essentially only the rich see or buy. Museums have gotten to the point where they’re so expensive to go to, you’re also limiting access to people who don’t have to buy the art, so they can’t even get in to see it. And then there are a lot of younger artists who are rejecting the gallery system pretty much altogether. They’re trying to engage communities directly and are doing nonobjective type of work, so they can’t be commodified as easily. It remains to be seen whether that’s going to be something that becomes a dominant form for art. My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting. But somehow the market has made it such that nobody talks about talent anymore. It’s almost politically incorrect to talk about an artist having talent, because then it’s exclusive.

Whereas the price tag isn’t?

It’s weird. The price tag has replaced it, and it’s certainly not a critical dialogue. It’s just something that’s a symbolic thing where it must mean the person who sells for the most money is the best artist.

Animals are people

Double Portrait, Lucien Freud

In the current Harper’s, this could be my new favorite by Lucien Freud.

64th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition

Samothracae, Jack Elliott

It’s impossible to do justice in a single blog post to a show as excellent as the 64^th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition at Memorial Art Gallery. Its effect is cumulative, as you wander past a hundred individual works. I learned recently that the heart rate of singers in a choir quickly synchronizes—so that every individual singer’s heart somehow times its pulse to the beat of every other heart in the choir. You get the sense of 81 unique hearts working in unison here as well, even though the artists live hundreds of miles apart, across the state of New York, pursuing a quiet, personal excellence. Each voice here is individual, operating in accord with its own unique set of stylistic principles, yet you feel the same passionate allegiance to private imperatives from one work to the next. You sense in this show a universal determination, across all the work, to focus on the slightest choices—how to render a line in a woodcut, how to stick to a certain kind of mark on canvas, how to check one’s ambitions into the confines of an unspectacular scale—as hard-won personal standards that result in mastery for that individual and no other in quite the same way. Jack Elliott’s Samothracea, the most powerful piece in the show, unapologetically reaches back many centuries for inspiration (it magically evokes its sculptural ancestor by pairing two enormous segments of willow trunks into a human torso that appears to be both in motion and standing still), while Donna Meadows Manier’s monoprint Luxury could be seen as sly up-to-the-minute commentary on our currently lopsided economy where a commodity can become an symbol of exclusive taste. In terms of diversity of style, purpose, and medium, you find yourself in a different world every time you take another step through the exhibition. But in each individual case, the craftsmanship is so uniformly subtle and understated, what’s happening in each work might slip right past you if you don’t dwell for a bit and give yourself time to see it. The spectacular nature of so much contemporary art has been shrugged off here in favor of values and dedication that don’t scream for attention but seductively invite it.

Since 1938, the Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition has served as a platform MORE

The rewards of painting

My work at the Memorial Art Gallery

I have to admit it’s cool to see my work hanging on a wall in our local museum only a few steps away from the spot where I stood when I was 18 and saw my first Rembrandt, Portrait of a Young Man. As part of the permanent collection, Rembrandt’s painting will be inhabiting the Memorial Art Gallery far longer than my work will. I’m on view for a couple months. (When you stand in a museum whose website tagline is “Fifty Centuries of World Art” you become hyper-aware of how little time you spend doing anything.) The 64th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition, which accepted three of my paintings, will last until Sept. 9.  Yet, as evanescent as my tenancy is there, my second participation in this exhibition (I sold my entry in the same exhibition four years ago) has given me a sense that the decades I’ve spent practicing, experimenting, learning, and building up one side of my back muscles from holding a brush aloft (I kid you not) have resulted in work that offers something of value to other people. I’ve had confirmation of this over the past five years, as I’ve begun to exhibit around the country and even in London, and I’ve sold a fair number of paintings, but this show always feels like the highest honor to me. Maybe because it happens here in what has become my home town, and maybe because the quality of the work, especially this year, and the quality of this museum, seems equal to anything I see anywhere I’ve looked at contemporary art. So the honor of being in this biennial show gives me a sense of achievement, but it also gives me a keen awareness of the humbling ironies implicit in being a visual artist now. Or almost any sort of dedicated, disciplined artist.

Artists in any field–poet, painter, musician, novelist, short story writer, actor, photographer, comic–do something that can represent a genuinely rare achievement (given the population of the world) and yet still be almost totally unknown and obscure (given the population of the world). Take it up to the highest notch, and this still holds true. You can even make a lot of money at what you do, be highly recognized in a given field, get profiles in glossy magazines and still labor in almost total obscurity when it comes to the human race as a whole. Part of the drive to be creative is to fashion something that could potentially have meaning or be a part of almost anyone’s life, in any time. Universal and timeless are a tired pair of adjectives that describe great art. Postmodernism aside, that’s the unspoken hope and dream of every artist: to make something that deserves those adjectives. And yet even the most celebrated and lucrative work, the art that reaches the most people and has the greatest chance of being seen years into the future, has little impact on most people. Jeff Koons is probably one of the most publicized and controversial artists now living and yet almost no one would recognize his face on the street. Nor would most people be familiar with his name or his work. I think those who devote their lives to art tend to forget how much it takes place in a comparatively tiny social bubble, at various levels–local, regional, national, even international. The global audience even for the MORE

Art at the “bottomest”

A student at Protsohan in New Delhi

A great, through brief, story on how one woman, Sonal Kapoor, is teaching art, design and photography to help poor girls in New Delhi escape lives of despair. The program also has a Facebook page. I loved their mission statement there: “Encouraging Skills Development & Creative Education through DESIGN THINKING at the bottomest of pyramid.”

Under the influence

Ithan Creek, Peter Allen Hoffman

I found the current show at Freight + Volume both disappointing and encouraging, which, if you think about it, ought to be a hard thing to pull off. It was a bit of a letdown in a way that I’ve experienced several times over the past couple years. It goes like this. Paintings that intrigue me when I see them reproduced on a website look much less vibrant and resonant in person. They aren’t as alive as I expect them to be. A surface richness I think I see in reproductions isn’t there when you stand before the actual work. (I remember reading an account of this same experience from someone who had gone to a show of Natalie Frank’s paintings.) It happened, for me, at Walton Ford’s most recent show at Kasmin. I still admire his scenes as much as ever, for many reasons, but I’d expected to revel more in his paint handling. Standing a couple feet away from the images, I wasn’t as charmed by them. Do I quibble? Probably. Would it matter to anyone other than a painter? Probably not. Yet, in some way that’s hard to explain, I felt a little conned at the surface level of the work. His interest didn’t seem to be in the paint itself, but in simply creating the illusion he wanted, as expeditiously as possible. Those same words could be applied as high praise for the work of Sargent or Hals or Vermeer or Fragonard any number of other painters—mastery often means getting the most powerful results out of the least effort. But up close a Vermeer remains as much a marvel of execution as it is from five feet away. Not so much with Ford. His work left me feeling as if the act of painting was something he was impatient to get past. At the recent Durer exhibition in Washington, for example, I never felt that way: MORE

May I have more, sir?

Peonies from Chris Lyons.  Harrington wondered why not do it as an actual serigraph, in whatever way Warhol did it. I wondered why not do it as big as Warhol did a serigraph. The difference would be, no irony. In any case, we want more, Speedy. Only large. Big Warhol serigraph, only larger. Just thinking aloud. I liked the white background better in the email you sent.

Post haste

Parquet Courts delivered. Sadly, the Post Office didn’t.

Represent is about the painting life. It says so up there on the banner. As of today, it’s also about shipping, which is a crucial part of the painting life (if you care to show your work to other people in a public way.) Mostly, over the past two years, I’ve been writing about the painting part, and not much about the life. So I’m going to correct that with a lesson on how not to attempt something absolutely essential to this pursuit: frugality. It’s always a good idea, in any field, to spend as little as possible, but especially as an artist. With that in mind, it would seem a no-brainer that I shouldn’t vacation in, say, Palm Springs. Or play golf. (Or visit New York City for that matter. You know how much parking costs in Manhattan? I don’t have the heart to tell you.) But if both your kids live and work in L.A., and you get to see them once a year when they come home for Christmas, going to L.A. for a week in the summer is the best option. This is because it’s exceedingly hot in the desert in July, when rounds of golf and rental homes are as inexpensive as they ever get there. During July, it would cost more to golf at many public courses here in Rochester.

So we save up my wife’s earnings from teaching second grade, and we spend a week with our kids in Palm Springs (much less expensive, actually, than staying virtually anywhere closer to L.A. itself), during one of the hottest weeks of the year. A round of 18 holes at Indian Canyons Golf, where my son Matthew and my son-in-law, John Bridge, and I will be playing every morning during our annual week in Palm Springs, costs $45 for eighteen holes, per player, unless you buy a summer discount card for a one-time fee of $65, which lowers the greens fees to $30 per person, every day, for the six days we play. A couple hundred dollars of savings! Beautiful. I’m a painter so, as you know, I can find the beauty in many things,  including a vacation where the daily high will be 115.

Which brings me to the subject of the U.S. Postal Service. I know, that’s a pretty bumpy transition, but it will make sense if you stay with me. MORE

Fearful symmetry

In Pakistan they paint actual trucks and consider it art, as they should. They also paint billboards as an art form. Mahwish Chishty imagines, in her paintings, this tradition applied to drones. Mother Jones asked her:

MJ: So has the Department of Defense asked you to repaint any of their Predators yet?

MC: [Laughs.] No, but I was thinking that would be so cool. I probably should put in a proposal for that.

Starry night

Night Sky in Nevada

If you’ve got six hours to spare, this is what it looks like to sit in rural Nevada and gaze at the stars. You can see them just starting to appear in the post-sunset sky here. Warhol wishes he’d done this. Full disclosure: I watched about 30 seconds. Click to YouTube to see any or all of it.

“Protests against authorship . . .”

Catcher In The Rye, facsimile plagiarized first edition, Richard Prince, $62.

Warhol shrugs.

“Richard Prince has been in the news a lot lately for his courtroom battles against the laws of copyright as they apply in fine art. Some have even suggested that Prince’s courtroom behavior—ambivalent responses to simple questions about his work—is  the latest stage of the artist’s protests against authorship and authority.”   —Interview

The courage! Protesting the tyranny of authorship! Oh so postmodern. Isn’t the disappearance of the common reader and the death of the mid-list book enough? The Koran might look nice with Prince’s name on it, but he should check with Rushdie first. (Anyone else think the last Sonic Youth album was so more compelling than this interview?) Someone recently told me, “The internet is a beautiful and complicated web of glittery bullshit.” Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes not.

Durer’s omnivorous eye

Detail, An Elderly Man of Ninety-Three Years, Durer

A week ago, I drove six hours, due south, from Rochester and arrived at the National Gallery during the final afternoon of the Durer exhibition in Washington, D.C. It would be a bit of an understatement to say a glimpse of some of the greatest art ever created was well worth the zigzag navigation of Pennsylvania’s state highways. Being able to stand a foot or two away from some of this work, from Vienna’s Albertina Museum, was a profound experience, and I walked away from this magnificent show with a much deeper awe over Durer’s genius. He may be the greatest draftsman who ever lived, not simply because of the accuracy and versatility of his representational skill—how true he could be to the way ordinary things actually look—but also, paradoxically, because of the idiosyncratic, obsessive extremity of his images, which always seem to convey something infinite and unknowable, even in the depiction of commonplace things. I’d be hard-pressed to think of any work of the Italian Renaissance that could compete with the intricate precision of Durer’s line.

It’s no accident that this exhibition focused on prints, drawings, and watercolor paintings—which, with Durer, are really drawings with color. His heart and soul, as well as his income, were in his drawings, not his oils. The show made clear he had a preternatural ability to reduce everything to line, especially when, standing close to one of his surfaces, you recognize that even when he was ostensibly “painting” on paper, he was often using parallel lines—as if he were doing an etching—to indicate shade. He established areas of mid-value simply by drawing straight or wavy lines, perfectly aligned and equally spaced, thick or thin, depending on the level of gray he wanted to evoke. Standing before some of this work, it’s hard to believe he could have done it without some kind of mechanical guide to steady his hand—the lines are so perfectly executed and uniform.

When Durer traveled to Italy, Giovanni Bellini refused to believe the artist could do what others said he could until he saw Durer demonstrate it. He asked Durer what tiny brushes he used, with multiple hairs that would produce the wavy parallel lines in his depiction of hair and fur and shaded areas. Durer showed him the ordinary, single-pointed brushes. “No, I don’t mean these but the ones with which you draw several hairs with one stroke; they must be rather spread out and more divided, otherwise in a long sweep such regularity of curvature and distance could not be preserved.” Nope, these are the ones, Durer said. Prove it, Bellini said. So he did. As Bellini later said, “Taking up one of the same brushes, he drew some very long wavy tresses such as women generally wear, in the most regular order and symmetry.” As a second observer recalled, “No human being could have convinced Bellini by report of the truth of that which he had seen with his own eyes.”The exhibition catalog expresses the same thing perfectly about MORE

The art of conversation

William Eggleston

From patriksandberg.com:

Drew Barrymore: How do you feel about cropping?

William Eggleston: I don’t.

DB: Thank you! Cheers. God bless you. There’s a part of me that feels like it’s not fair.

WE: You’re right, it’s not. It’s messing with things. There’s something sinister about it. When it’s cropped that’s not you anymore. So that’s one reason I don’t do it. Another reason is just one of those personal disciplines. I might have picked it up originally from [Henri-]Cartier [Bresson], who was a fanatic of never cropping. You know, I had a meeting with him, one in particular, it was at this party in Lyon. Big event, you know. I was seated with him and a couple of women. You’ll never guess what he said to me.

DB: What?

WE: “William, color is bullshit.” End of conversation. Not another word. And I didn’t say anything back. What can one say? I mean, I felt like saying I’ve wasted a lot of time. As this happened, I’ll tell you, I noticed across the room this really beautiful young lady, who turned out to be crazy. So I just got up, left the table, introduced myself, and I spent the rest of the evening talking to her, and she never told me color was bullshit.