Since today I’m posting some messier stuff here’re two old drawings I did with my eyes closed. Nice yellowing tape, right? They’re probably from somewhere between 91-93. The first one illustrates the end Absolom meets, (II Samuel, 18: 9-15) the second illustrates the beginning of a new age.
I love looking at these, it’s like looking at someone else’s work.
Since in my post on Seurat I quoted Rilke’s “cell of my art” statement, I figured I might as well post one of my favorite all time comparison lessons on that style “commandment.” Above are two well known paintings by Van Gogh. One is painted by the artist we know Van Gogh becomes and one is painted before Van Gogh fully realized that transformation. I think the chief difference between these two paintings is how each painting relates to itself. The difference between these two painting styles is in the relation between what the painting conveys and how it is rendered. In the first, the smoking skull image, an idea of something is conveyed, however vaguely, without regard to how it is rendered. The idea is communicated then we notice how it is communicated, the calligraphy in which it is written. In the second one, the sunflower,what the painting conveys is conveyed through how it is rendered. It contains no abstractable message by which we can paraphrase it and do without the painting. The painting is all. I like to think that both paintings have the same thing to say. They are both Van Gogh expressing something, but only in the second painting is the artist mature enough to say what he means.
I intended to have and thought I had included this drawing among the eight I posted the other day. This is another one of the drawings for the dummy print. It is a portion of a much larger sketch I did while talking on the phone. Yes, I was doodling. This is way back at pretty much the beginning of my output. At the time, everything I made had to be run through at least two processes: a process of discovery and a process of copying. Oo it sounds so rich and suggestive when I say it that way. To me anyway. I redrew this portion once more and clarified it, calling it Winged Antaeus. That was a third process I’ve tried to ditch since: everything I made had to be further made by an obvious allusion to classical Greek mythology. Classical Greek Mythology which may or may not have been in olden times attached to a common store of images with which artists might knowingly address their audiences. The common store of images is still there, of course, it’s just that rough old name by which each image was called have mostly been forgotten. At least, I think they’re mostly forgotten. Is there any way to hurry the process? Artists are better off having to create meanings that must be felt rather than merely identified and checked against a list.
But to return to the question of process. In this case the process of discovery was the doodling. And the copying — oh so mysterious to say — was done before I drew. Oo, deep! Drawing as copying when there is no original. I’m not in the mood to explore such an idea right now (my last post is clever enough to last me awhile) but maybe somebody should explore it if it hasn’t already been explored. Which is a big if.
Okay, you can sit back in your seats: I’m ready to share the whole truth. My process for this and many pieces at the time was this divination I’ve spoken of before. I’d soaked paper towels in watercolor, rolled them into a ball and then rolled the balls onto white sheets of paper. I took these sheets to the corner drug store (which was the only place one could find a copy machine at the time: at the time they were known as Xerox machines.) and enlarged them until I saw something interesting.
I thought I saw something interesting in this:
I attached a piece of heavy tracing paper to the top of it and the next time I was on the phone, I kept half my attention on the conversation and half on the ambiguous shapes the photocopied watercolors had created.
Now, at this size this doodle is a muddy mess. The original doodle for Winged Antaeus is dead center on the right edge of the drawing. She is nicely lit up I think. Some people can’t see her at all. She is a nude who spreads her wings to take flight though her legs are encased in earth. Poetical.
The rest of the page is full of other winged people, children climbing up vertical beds, people suspended and crucified, and couples embracing. What I guess is the main subject of the drawing is visible in the detail below. A seated figure tugs at a noose around his neck while a couple enjoys some wanton time beside him. What always fascinates me about this kind of drawing is that, while it is inspired by random marks, the many individual passages are united by a common theme. The theme was in no way pre-meditated. More like precognitive.
I liked the “lit up” quality of W.A. so much I scanned it again at full size. I had completely forgotten about the green smears. That was some kind of accident that happened years later. I don’t remember what happened, but I think it works.
To view this post in light of the previous one regarding Seurat’s marks, I can say phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny — my own course as an artist has repeated the course of Modernism — where first I threw off storytelling to let my rendering of object’s be my meaning, then I abandoned representing objects altogether. The image is really the only bit of Winged Antaeus I still admire as drawing as opposed to idea.
Still paddling down the stream of recent Art History I’ve since abandoned my previous abandonment and have happily returned to storytelling.
This is a reproduction of a drawing by Seurat of folds in a dress. As I was looking at it, it struck me that you could see the same folds in the paper if he hadn’t drawn all over it. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve admired Seurat my whole life. Though I’ve mostly studied his paintings, his conte crayon drawings have such a spooky photosensitivity, so camera-like, to me they convey a kind of spiritual detachment. This detachment a viewer can participate in simply by viewing these drawings.
But the close up study above pointed out a difference of art between his paintings and drawings. I think the study made me aware of the paper because he’s using the paper’s grain as a means to make his marks effective. Using a lighter touch he creates a half-tone as his crayon blackens the highest points of the surface and leaves the lowest points unmarked. He creates an illusion of the quality of light on a surface (a dress) employing the quality of another surface (the paper). This use of the paper, I’ve done it a thousand times myself, strikes me as somehow incomplete as artwork. This incompleteness, as I said, makes me think of the actuality of the paper. I feel drawn to remember it and the selfless erasure it endured in aiding the artist.
In contrast, the pointilist marks of Seurat’s paintings polarize the artist’s work from the rest of nature. Here he accepts no help from his materials. He commands his materials and makes them do what he wishes. He will not even allow his colors to mix. That was his choice, that was his interest, his chosen means.
Human creators do not have access to the atomic level (artists anyway) and must discover their own smallest building block. Each must innovate an idiosyncratic truth to which a life’s work can be devoted. Rilke speaks of it in terms of Cezanne, Rodin, and his own poetry: “Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything…” After this discovery the artist is free to become a laborer and to spend every minute of life working at “expressing everything.”
I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. I acknowledge it as some kind of commandment in a history of evolving commandments. The opposite of this commandment has also proved its virtue. There is something to allowing the materials themselves to show off their textures, allowing a single color, perhaps found among debris in the street, to be the “smallest constituent element.” The artist offers the struggle to the viewer, to see a thing-in-itself aesthetically. That also has its spiritual identity. But that innovation too is something discovered long ago.
Still I find useful this idea of the artist’s search for a polarizing means. Seurat painted his strange dotty pictures. There is the quality of metaphor or conveyance or transfer about them. You look at them and you ask, “what is this strange thing he’s done, and why do I feel I recognize it? “
