{"id":3298,"date":"2013-08-27T12:29:49","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T12:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=3298"},"modified":"2013-08-27T12:41:45","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T12:41:45","slug":"13-ways-of-looking-at-a-cupcake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=3298","title":{"rendered":"13 ways of looking at a cupcake"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"four<\/a>

Lower left, pure suck. Upper left, success so far. Other two: fear and trembling.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI was of three minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds.\u201d \u2013Wallace Stevens<\/i><\/p>\n

1.\u00a0In the circus of baked goods, cupcakes are the clowns. A cupcake has to be the least significant object anyone could paint. It is utterly devoid of both nutritional value and any possible claim to importance. It\u2019s a subject worthy of Fragonard with his frothy, virtuoso sense of gratuitous gesture. And worthy of his period in history, for that matter. But that isn\u2019t the point. For all I know, a cupcake may in fact be crying on the inside, but I see no evidence.<\/p>\n

2. Painting a cupcake forces you to focus on purely formal qualities in the image. The shape and form, from painting to painting, can be as uniform as Rothko\u2019s horizons or Motherwell\u2019s odes to Spain, or Stella\u2019s chevrons or any of Jim Dine\u2019s uniform, repetitive templates for color: his hearts or robes, for example. (Dine\u2019s paired hearts and skulls are another, interesting matter.) With a cupcake you eliminate a whole suite of choices and have no recourse but to focus on the fundamentals: color, line, value, the surface, and the quality of the paint itself. They all do that subconscious thing they do, which you can\u2019t reduce to some interpretable \u201cmeaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. When it comes to cupcakes, I\u2019m no virtuoso, which is unfortunate, because that ought to be the whole point of doing them. I still haven\u2019t learned how to paint one properly except for maybe a couple instances and I\u2019ve been trying, off and on, for several years. So far, toward the end of the job, I loathe painting them. Early on, with the first or second coat of paint, I love it. I love the flat, simple areas of pure color. Paying attention to that early stage and letting that be the whole point would mean I have to quit doing nearly everything that has gotten me exhibited as a painter, except for the candy jars and a couple other pieces. But in those I\u2019ve still relied on exactitude in the way I render something. If I just did a cupcake, one coat, just cartoonish and flat, all color, then what? Would I be satisfied? The spontaneity and purity of color and the lack of finish needs to be preserved to the very last stroke. But that doesn\u2019t mean simply stopping at the flat first coat. That isn\u2019t what I want. \u00a0It just needs to work as a flat pattern, and the color needs to feel unmolested, while the image is doing other things. That\u2019s the challenge.<\/p>\n

4. Emily Eveleth cheats. She piles her languid, sybaritic donuts on top of one another like exhausted lovers and suggests unpleasant (significant!) things in the way they ooze jelly. The value of the work is in the way she paints a donut, the quality of the light and color and the paint itself, not in the fact that it hints at decadence. Making it \u201cmeaningful\u201d is just pandering to a critic or a buyer. Thiebaud doesn\u2019t cheat. It\u2019s about the paint, the color and the light. Nothing else.<\/p>\n

5. For decades, my favorite painters\u2014not necessarily the ones I admire the most, but the ones I most love to look at\u2014have been obsessed by color, to the exclusion of anything like photographic realism. Van Gogh, Bonnard, Matisse, Avery, Matthiasdottir, Thiebaud, Fish, Rothko, Fairfield Porter and the current Wolf Kahn. The challenge is how to continue to represent the look of the world in a compelling way while adhering to color as the reason to paint. For years now I keep venturing into this region and then retreating from it. Painting nine cupcakes, for a start, is a way of forcing myself to confront the formal challenges of actually working the way those painters did and trying to find a way to ease away from arduously detailed realism toward something primarily about color.<\/p>\n

6. When I\u2019ve done cupcakes, and other subjects, in the past I\u2019ve usually succumbed to the urge to simply duplicate what\u2019s there, which is hard enough to do\u2014and therefore pleasant labor. This work has found its way into exhibits, and it has sold. But as much as I love doing this work, and will continue to do it, it always feels a bit like a capitulation. For years, I\u2019ve done a series of enlarged images\u2014candy jars, flowers, cupcakes, faces now and then\u2014in an attempt to make large areas of color work, at that scale, the way they do in an abstract. The cupcakes have been the least successful, because I\u2019ve always lapsed back into rendering rather than allowing myself to take liberties and allow a painterly technique to yield surprising harmonies of color. Working repeatedly with a nearly uniform image may force me to back away from the comfort of photo-based rendering without losing the image\u2019s ability to convince the viewer that he or she is seeing an actual object with a sense of depth.<\/p>\n

7. The concern for the flat, formal qualities of paint at the surface level doesn\u2019t mean the image needs to look<\/i> flat. But keeping the flat surface uppermost in mind is the easiest way to preserve the life and beauty of color without muddying it up. Hence the challenge of a cupcake, which is anything but flat, especially that difficult icing which resists an economical technique.<\/p>\n

8. It takes humility to paint a cupcake. Any attempt to invest a cupcake with significance . . . forget about it. One could say: a cupcake represents the frivolity of luxury, how it\u2019s a symptom of excess and moneyed leisure, a symbol of our economic end times, the enormous gap between the pampered rich and the rest. As in Fragonard\u2019s time. Or one could take the long view and \u00a0say: it\u2019s Jungian, a symbol of sex, or at least the fusion of genders, with its rigid and straight corrugation of the fluted cup, the stumpy phallus of the cake, and the petals and labia of the icing. Please. It\u2019s a cupcake. It doesn\u2019t mean anything. You eat it.<\/p>\n

9. What I leave out is going to be at least as important as what I leave in. Generalizing an area of value and color will be even more significant than sharply defining other parts of the image so that it tricks the eye. How to decide what to render, and what not, is going to be the crux of the thing.<\/p>\n

10. Pun alert. A cupcake could also be compared to a Buddhist stupa. But not only is that a stretch, it would really<\/i> be cheating.\u00a0 It\u2019s also hard, with a cupcake, to see the point. (You were warned.)<\/p>\n

11. An age-old question: can a painting be so good you want to eat it? Not an age-old question? Fine. Whatever. Settle down, Van Gogh.<\/p>\n

12. Painting a cupcake is essentially the same as painting an image of a sculpture. It\u2019s art about art. I don\u2019t want to hang a picture of a cupcake on my wall. But I do want to hang an excellent painting, no matter what it depicts, on my wall.<\/p>\n

13. It takes humility to paint a cupcake. (It\u2019s worth repeating.) The art world doesn\u2019t need cupcakes. It could<\/i> use some intellectual humility.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI was of three minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds.\u201d \u2013Wallace Stevens 1.\u00a0In the circus of baked goods, cupcakes are the clowns. A cupcake has to be the least significant object anyone could paint. It is utterly devoid of both nutritional value and any possible claim to importance. 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