Art in History

The Winter Aconite are in bloom in my garden, edging out the Snowdrops, and a good week or two before we'll see crocuses. These spots of yellow are always the first, peeking through late snowdrifts, and foretelling the more insistent yellow of daffodils and forsythia. With the glories of goldenrod in late August and September, these are the yellows that frame our New England Summer season. In the old days, Spring always meant spring cleaning, in the house, yard and garden. As an artist who produces abundantly, it also means deciding which paintings do not make the cut and should be recycled. Since I paint on panels which store very efficiently if unframed, this is not a necessary process physically, but it seems to be very important to me psychologically… Continue reading… 0 comments

This is a subject I have worried around before (see for example "Significant Art: What does it Signify?") because it gets to the heart of those subconscious doubts I have about the value of my work. Though I am going to look at it here from the persepctive of art history, I clearly care about it as a kind of self-justification. My art is not an art of innovation. What uniqueness it has comes unconsciously and inevitably from the personal vision which each of us has, not from any attempt to break new ground. I am not even an experimental artist (a much less demanding standard); many artists who never break new ground nevertheless experiment with different styles and media, doing work that is new for them if not for art as a whole… Continue reading… 3 comments

In my last post I dealt with the subject of multiple levels of meaning in an image. I realize that there is another way in which we use levels of meaning which I had not even touched on, the way which is most natural to me: the pun or double meaning. This can be a double meaning between the image and its title - word play - or within the image itself, which I will call image play. I am a punster from my earliest years, much to the dismay and suffering of my friends and companions. The earliest pun I remember (except maybe "what is black and white and red all over?") was the riddle "when is a door not a door?" "When it's ajar". What makes a pun so appealing (to a few of us!) is that we have that moment of connection between "ajar" and "a jar"… Continue reading… 2 comments

Back in my days as a student of Architecture, I read with interest the writings of Charles Jencks on Le Corbusier, one of the giants of the modern movement in the 20th century. In advocating for the greatness of Le Corbusier, Jencks did someting much more ambitious: he propounded a theory of value to be applied to all art, based on multiple levels of meaning. All works of art, he says, fall somewhere on a spectrum from "Univalence" (single-leveled) to "multivalence" (multileveled), and truly great works are always multivalent. He compares in detail Le Corbusier's apartment block in Marseilles, the "Unite d'Habitation", with a contemporary church design (of which I could find no image) in the form of a cross of thorns… Continue reading… 2 comments

The other day a member asked me how she could get more visitors to notice her gallery among the multitude on the site. I gave her several suggestions, including sending people to your gallery through other media such as Facebook, blogging about it, or using key descriptive words in your text. Another way is to have a niche, a little corner of the art scene which, when a viewer is looking for it, they will find only a handful artists who qualify. If you are an Equestrian painter, or a painter of infant portraits, your chances are vastly improved… Continue reading… 4 comments

As we approach the new year, I am realizing that it is now ten years since ArtId took birth (as MindsIsland), and just how many articles I have written and posted over that period. I took a look, and discovered that many of the older ones were not presentable, having been crudely converted from native HTML to our present platform. I have just completed a process of spiffing them up, in high hopes that someone out there might care. This post is for those who have enjoyed my writings, and are interested in poking around among the many I have done in the past. It is a summary of the main topics I have dealt with, and some instructions on how you can find them. Because if you don't know they are there, you can't even decide whether you care or not… Continue reading… 3 comments

It is arguable that, as artists, one of our primary goals is to produce a reflection of what we understand as reality. If we are artists working in the Western Tradition, or simply raised in it, we are heirs to 600 years of realism. Though much Western art in the last 100 years has rejected this tradition, it is still a very powerful force. Whether it is a photorealist like Tennett, or the pervasive legacy of the impressionists, art dedicated to reflecting the real world is everywhere. But there are lots of choices, because there is no single definition of what is real. The strongest thread since Renaissance times had been to define reality as the world as it appears to us from a certain viewpoint… Continue reading… 4 comments

Artists all seem to have a common fantasy: that fame and riches will come to them posthumously. We may not really believe it, but it is a well entrenched part of artistic mythology. We could call it the Van Gogh Factor. This raises another interesting question: if our death is the first day of the rest of our artistic lives, what's the best time to die? There is abundant evidence that dying young may be a great career move; there is a similar wealth of examples proving that we should live to a ripe old age. Artists who die young may leave a vibrant and untarnished legacy; on the other hand there are many artists who reach new heights in maturity… Continue reading… 6 comments

A new artist has joined our community at the Indian Orchard Mills this year who has me stunned and envious. She is Christina Mastrangelo, recently returned from three years of study in Florence, study in the age old tradtion of Academic Realism, such as would have been practiced 200 years ago. She is young and very,very good; one source of my envy. The other is that she practices an approach which I admire greatly, but know I could never emulate. In one way our vision is very similar: we are both seeking to capture what we see in the world, the truth of form, color and light. On another level, our vision is totally different. Christina paints what is permanent and eternal in reality; I paint what is immediate and transitory… Continue reading… 1 comment

I recently had a wonderful experience as a volunteer participant in Best Buddies "Artistic Abilities" program. I went in wanting to donate my time to this very worthy organization; I came away with much more than I contributed. "Artistic Abilities" is a fundraising event for Best Buddies , an organization which works with intellectually challenged young people. Artists are paired with a buddy and collaborate to produce a work or works of art together. The main event will be held on Thursday November 5 at CityStage in Springfield MA, and will include an auction of the donated works… Continue reading… 2 comments

It is autumn in New England! That means it is both a wonderful and a dangerous time for plein air painters. Nature is begging you to capture her beauty, but also challenging you to compete with her brilliance. Fall color, perhaps more than any other subject, teaches you humility and caution, because it is a competition you will always lose. At any time, the range of color and value in nature is far beyond the range available to the artist trying to represent it. Usually, nature's restraint allows us to compete, by using strong color to represent that which in nature is muted. It is relatively easy to set up a range of color and value which will represent what we see. Autumn in New England is not so kind… Continue reading… 3 comments

I have discovered over the years that one of the things that turns me on most in my visual environment is accidental composition: the unplanned conjunction of elements into a grouping that has balance, energy and meaning. I find this in nature in abundance, but also in the works of man gathered together at random, or changed by alterations or decay over time. What results is composition which takes me beyond the familiar rules into new possibilities. Historically, I find this same fascination in Impressionists like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. With the aid of candid photography, which created arbitrary slices of the world, they revolutionized the way artists could think about composition in painting… Continue reading… 2 comments

I was a young man - a young artist - when Marshall McLuhan came out with his seminal statement: "The medium is the message". The idea had tremendous power, since it seemed to sum up a century of change in attitudes toward the art object (visual, auditory, written) and its purpose. The work of art was its own reason for being; it did not have to serve any outside purpose. For me this is not only an exciting idea, it is a justification for what I secretly often feel is a failing of mine: my work isn't serving a higher purpose that I can define. Which means that, deep down, I don't fully accept that my work has no need to "teach" or "advocate". There is this suspiciaon that the work that deserves the most respect is the one with a higher purpose… Continue reading… 2 comments

A few years ago I did a small piece under this same title, comparing two landscape paintings which treated the viewer very differently, one inviting him in, the second deliberately blocking his way. As a follow up to my recent posts on landscape painting, I thought that I should say more on this topic, which involves many of the most powerful tools available to the landscape painter. The most compelling aspect of a landscape painting is its ability to draw the viewer into its world. We will see later that the choice to exclude the viewer is powerful precisely because it frustrates this natural impulse to enter and explore. The "Cornfield" by Constable is a beautiful example of the magic of invitation, and of many of the most common devices by which it is nurtured… Continue reading… 1 comment

I decided I would do one more post in this series on the origins of Modern art, because without talking about the notion of the avant garde, something is definitely missing. Of all the ideas which led to the phenomenon of Modern Art, the Avant Garde idea is perhaps the most fascinating and revolutionary. What is the avant garde idea? It is the attitude that artists are an elite in society, specially equipped to sense the pulse of the times and reveal it to their contemporaries. Artists on the cutting edge of stylistic development will be "ahead of their time", will be rejected in their time, but will be vindicated by history. This is huge! This idea upends the relationship of an artist to his patrons… Continue reading… 5 comments

This post is another in my series on the origins of modern art, and my last, at least for a while: I'm not sure who is listening. I hope the title at least is intriguing. I could easily have called it "Modern Art and the Problem of Style", but this title seems sexier! The problem with a sexy title is of course the letdown. What is the innocence whose loss I see as a major impetus toward modern art? It is the innocence of the artist of his place in the history of art. The villain is historical awareness, and the consequent impossibility of producing art "innocently", without the burden of an everpresent knowledge of one's artistic past. This became a huge concern in the 19th century in Europe… Continue reading… 5 comments

In my last post, I promised to put out some additional posts on the major trends which led up to the phenomenon of Modern Art. One of these was a new way of looking at paintings, one which isolated the aesthetic qualities of the work and appreciated them independent of the subject matter. In 2000 I did an article called "The Aesthetic Attitude" in which I looked at this phenomenon, and I will include a big chunk of that post here: [QUOTE]One of the most fascinating of the developments that occurred during the 18th century was the recognition of an independent aesthetic attitude toward art, and indeed toward the world. Of course, this is not the first appearance of such an attitude in mankind's artistic history; far from it… Continue reading… 2 comments

The moment at the beginning of the 20th century when artists made the lead to pure non-representational art is a fascinating one. It is the culmination of a number of trends over the previous 100-200 years, each interesting in itself, and together creating a uniquely self-aware moment in art. First, I would like to register my complaint about the term "abstract", which has come to be applied indiscriminately to non-representational art. The term describes very well the process which led up to the leap, but is misleading when applied to "pure abstraction". Abstraction implies a process of generalizing and simplifying from the specific; it presumes a reality from which essentials are being drawn… Continue reading… 4 comments

A couple of weeks ago I was driving up Interstate 89 in Vermont, keeping an eye as usual on the rockfaces which border the highway. Highway cuts expose the inner skeleton of the living rock, almost like cracking open a geode. What struck me is that not all exposed rock is interesting, and of the interesting rock, not all of it "works". Rocks, and any element in nature, may compose, or it may not. Many things can contribute to this natural composition: color, texture, the conformity of lines, all things which are available to the artist as well. But what I particularly noticed was that a rockface worked when it had large forms, and did not when there were none… Continue reading… 4 comments

After my recent post on landscape painting of the Romantic period, I want to do a more general piece on the appeal of landscape. I believe this appeal is grounded in the appeal to our age of scenes in nature, and that painted landscapes depend in large part on capturing this appeal. This appeal has many sources, but for me, two of them stand out: empathy and nostalgia. Even without these two elements, which we bring to nature from within ourselves, landscape would have plenty going for it. It is infinite in variety of texture, form and color, infinite in its possibilities for order, composition and movement. But these possibilities have always been there, and can't explain the immense appeal of landscape in the modern era… Continue reading… 6 comments