Category Archives: looking at art

heartened by another painting

I didn’t know what I was getting in to. I had never heard of this artist, an American woman, Mary Whyte, showing a large collection of watercolors at the Greenville County Museum in South Carolina. Something kind of pulled me to go and I got the last seat (one that had just opened up for me!) on a Senior Citizen bus making the trip. My, my, my…am I glad I went! Mary was the docent that day which was an extraordinary treat, and she explained the way her project “Working South” got started. So much can be gleaned when a serious artist explains her motivation, and her words confirmed the sense I had been gathering in front of her work, that this is a woman who sees deeply, and then through her formidable skill, loves well.

The very first piece I shot a photo of that day was the one I kept going back to out of the 50 large images in this collection. Her project was to document the people in the South whose livelihoods are disappearing. “The Bee Keeper’s Daughter” was a sermon in paint for me. It left me speechless, and deeply comforted. Beyond the occupation being rendered here were the symbols of her task: silent, and covered, with mystery ascending. The woman has her mouth slightly open as if in a quiet, possibly even joyful conversation. There is a rising of smoke. I guess beekeepers do that; but it too is emblematic to me. And the bee hives make a random-seeming tottering back into deep space, as if pacing toward the horizon. The bees too leave bitter streaks around her, but she is unmoved in her protective garb, her focus is elsewhere. She stands to the side. Most of Mary’s subjects are placed that way, off center. But clearly each subject is the focus of her concern, the reason she documents in color. She looks into souls with her work, and her work (way beyond her ability) looked back into mine. I got a visual that day that is sticking with me. It confirmed what I had already been pondering and then, right there it was. This is art at its best. I was supposed to be there that day. I left strangely warmed. I am one of The Bee Keeper’s Daughters. Thank-you to the Maker of Mary.

(and thank-you Mary Whyte for letting me except this here)

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arrested by a painting

This month, I was arrested by a painting. It was among many other works in a fine exhibit the Germans brought to Beijing, housed in the newly constructed National Museum. The exhibit, covering several rooms, highlighted the “The Art of the Enlightenment.”

The Enlightenment is known by historians as a time of great scientific discovery in the West, and known by art historians for its grandiose swings away from the patronage and parochialism of the Church to a search for higher human ideals for source material. Artists explored themes and styles to authenticate their aims. From this time we get the beginnings of brilliant graphic political satire (Hogarth and Goya), a revisit to the ancient mythologies of Classicism (Delacroix, Titian), and the development of Romanticism and its reach to the landscape.

It’s easy to see how the Chinese, though not as inclined to the former two aspects of this time in Western history, would certainly resonate with the importance of the landscape. Enlightenment artists thought they had discovered “the sublime,” when all along Chinese landscape artists had been musing on those depths for centuries. There was a whole room dedicated to these sublime European landscapes and the room was being well visited.

In this room I found a small oil—“Dolmen in the Snow”—by a German I knew little of, Caspar David Friedrich. This piece is simple and profound. The foreground is foreboding, indeed a dolmen is a burial place. The three trees in the painting appear dead as well, though likely dormant from winter. The central tree is leaning and is closest to the dolmen. There has been much cutting of branches of the other two trees. But of the fingerlets of branches we see, they are all reaching upward.

Snow blankets this quiet scene, and there are no figures except a lone bird whose position indicates we are located in a high place. The starkness of contrast between this dismally yearning and empty scene and the sky is what stopped me. The sky is luminescent and beckoning, warm and enveloping/changing the entire effect. Apparently Friedrich intended this piece (as with some of his other works) to be a defense of his faith as a Christian.

Friedrich was living at a time when to be overt about one’s faith was “uncool” according to the groupthink. So he stays under the radar but uses his art to symbolize what is in his heart. It still speaks. In fact, later artists look to some of his work as the beginning of symbolism.

The last room of this entire exhibit was a jump into the Modern/Postmodern era with a few selections: a portrait by Andy Warhol, some abstracts and a sculpture by Beselitz, and a video by Joseph Beuys. My sense is that the curators were wanting to show the end result, to date, of the aims of the Enlightenment. In their Western conceit they think that the end is always going to be better than the beginning, that tolerance really is the highest ideal, that meaninglessness and self-mythologizing is very deep.

I think the Chinese observers will likely have more an objective detachment and consider this end otherwise. The art speaks for itself. For me, I’m back in that landscape room.

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Speaking of Motherwell, and Art’s Intention

I was recently over at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, NC to see the exhibit “Lost in Form, Found in Line”. What a treat of imagery that was! Since I first was exposed to his work years ago, Motherwell has interested me; and then the more I read of him, my visual perceptions were confirmed that his work was not only attractive visually, but important conceptually. He was a thinker. I think he was also a paradox. For as was true amongst all the Abstract Expressionists after World War II, Robert Motherwell said that his work did not carry meaning. Yet his working process involved a lot of serious thought, considered musings, was often prompted by text. So his protestations about specific meaning often seemed disingenuous to me, the political correctness of his own time. Surely he was protesting the insult of casual viewers’ assumptions, e.g. “I see a duckie and a fishy”, when looking at his or anyone else’s non- representational work. He said that the subject of his work would emerge undirected “out of an interaction between myself, my I, and my medium.” But he also often admitted to big themes. One of his biographers, Jack Flam, says that Motherwell “wanted to create an art that would deal with the universal rather than the specific, yet be charged with feeling.” Motherwell often started with an idea. Then that idea got melded in the creative process, yet remained the idea/now feeling nonetheless, for he considered every mark, even buried under newer layers, part of the work’s important expressive history. Is this not then communication? Is this not then the embodiment, however shrouded, of some particular meaning?
I know for me, the first time I confronted abstract work at the Art Institute of Chicago when a teenager, I assumed immediately that it was coded language. It was not simple, but it was fascinating and even beckoning to me. See an example here. Now, I have been teased by an artist friend that I am looking for meaning everywhere. Actually, I have decided this is not such a foolish thing, for art is ultimately another human language. It is enculturated and wholly nuanced certainly, but it is a form of communication, I am convinced. Bird tracks on snow have meaning, even if the bird had no intention. How much more the marks of humans. The impetus to get out the materials and create starts with some kind of intention in mind, however small or unformed. Our marks leave a trail, and even trails that lead nowhere carry some inherent meaning.

(above image is “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No 110”, accessed off Bing)

On Hope-first thoughts

I am by genetic temperament, and fostered by early upbringing a pessimist; yet my work is said to be filled with hope! This to me, as I stand back and look is a complete surprise- “a huge contradiction,” I critique myself. Or, maybe better reckoned as an intervention – that is, there is something else that is working inside of me. Indeed, hope is the thing that gets me into the inks at all. Sometimes there is this inevitable agony – every artist I have ever spoken to attests to this agony. I love how David Bayles and Ted Orland summarize this in Art and Fear, “Basically those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue – or more precisely, have learned how not to quit…art is all about starting again.” So, there has to be hope that is dredged up from somewhere, or every artist would simply have no choice but to quit.

The Greeks considered hope dangerous. Indeed in the myth of Pandora, when the box was opened, there were released all the evils except one: that being hope. Hope was protected from release for its risky companion was delusion. However, in the end, Pandora had to release hope because otherwise humanity was filled with despair. To the Greeks then, hope must first have been considered an evil, which when weighed on the scales opposite despair, was bartered from evil to good.

Emily Dickinson succumbed to the risky business. And she heralds it this way, “Hope is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the song without the words – And never stops – at all.” I can identify with this thing that sings inside (and I didn’t put it there, I simply can’t make this happen). I share resonance with the words first penned by that serious and solitary woman from Amherst. It is an intervention, and it strikes me with awe. This is a core thing.

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