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. My art grows and changes, very gradually, not through any decision to change but only through growing sensitivity to the task I have always pursued. Periodically I wonder if this kind of art is worthy of attention.

I'd like to look back on artists of the past, seeing them by the measure of innovation vs tradition. I think that Jasper John's "White" Flag is one of many works in the late 20th century which use the dichotomy deliberately to create tension in their work. But most artists do not address the issue so consciously; they are either innovators or consolidators (traditionalists) by temperament and inclination.

Perhaps the archetype of the innovator, in art and everything else, is Leonardo da Vinci. He produced few major works, partly because he was too busy inventing and exploring almost every other area of human endeavor, but also because once he had created a new archetype (like the pyramidal "Madonna" composition) he would lose interest, allowing others like Raphael to do the work of consolidation. Raphael was not a traditionalist, continuing in the late medieval style as did many of his contemporaries, but he was a consolidator, working through the implications of Leonardo's invention and taking it to its apex.

Art Historians place immense value on the seminal moments the Leonardo produced with almost every work, while tearing out their hair trying to preserve his "Last Supper' fresco. He couldn't be satisfied with traditional freso technilque, experimenting with new combintations of materials which are now falling off the wall.

Another pair of contemporaries who facinate me are the English artists Constable and Turner. Emerging from the same naturalistic tradition, they become alomst polar opposites in their approach. Though his sensitivity carried him beyond any of his predecessors, Constable is clearly a traditionalist by temperament, comfortably within the landscape tradition which emerged in 17th century Holland. From the point of view of art history, Turner is much more forward-looking, anticipating abstract expressionism in the freedom of his color and handling. I admire Turner, but I love Constable.

However, the artists I love most fall into both camps. If I look at still life, I would have to say I admire Cezanne more then Chardin, but I love them equally. Chardin's great strength is his "conservatism": the comfortable solidity and eternal rightness of his compositions, the earthy harmony and predicatbility of his colors. Ceazanne's still lives are alive with the titanic struggle that we see in all his work between the demands of solid form and the demands of the paint surface. They feed different parts of my soul.

One thing that strikes me about the last 100 years is the increasing divergence in art between the traditional and the innovative. Through technological leaps and ever increasing speed of communication of information, the world is changing at a geometrically increasing pace. One of the choices that face artists to between expressing the change and newness in their work, and alternately searching for what is stable and familiar. The human race has adapted radically to its new physical and intellectual environment, but it also has an every increasing longing for the way things were. I am certainly one who clings to what nurtures me in nature and in the familiar.

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". In that moment, we have the image of the door as a jar, nonsensical and therefore ridiculous.

I use word play in my titles all the time, partly for the fun of it, but also to trigger a second level of meaning or response in the viewer. The image above I titled "Wheels"; very straightforward on the face of it, but also referring to the slang meaning of "wheels": to have a car, to be mobile. Hopefully, that helps evoke a constrast between the unmoving stack of discarded wheels and their former function. I look for the same mental picture of former movement and action in the titles of "Tailgating" and "Bumper to Bumper".

The two main series that I worked on this past year are very good examples of how I use wordplay to enrich meaning for the viewer. In my series of tree portraits, I was always looking for older trees with character, trees that were expressing in their forms and growth scars. For me these always seemed to evoke comparisons with human feelings and actions. I'm showing two examples: "Spearbearer" and "Expecting", which I assume you can attach to the appropriate images. Hopefully the pairing of the image and title also triggers the chain of ideas which the tree triggered for me.

In my more ambitious series of rocks and rockfaces over the last 18 months, I found the same vivid evocation of character and personality that I find in trees. Rocks (a name I never give to ordinary stones) are each unique each expressive in their bulk, their forms, colors and textures. Here I show two examples again: "Returning to the Sea", a marvelous limestone formation on the southern coast of Portugal, and "Building Blocks" a rockface of pink granite in Maine. You probably don't need the titles to appreciate them, but perhaps you do to appreciate the reaction I had to them.

It is interesting that I have not made more use of image play: the introduction of double meanings in the images themselves. There are many examples in the work of other artists - Goya, Picasso, Dali - but they involve combining disparate pieces of reality together to make ambiguous images. I seem wedded to faithful adherence to the image in front of me. The closest I come is in manipulating the reality itself in still lives, such as "Encounter" (which also has a wordplay title) and "Self Portrait with Jewelry Box", which I love for its juxtaposition of two spaces, of the rectangular frame with an oval frame, and most of all the juxtaposition of me with my wife's dressing table. This is a painting with many levels on which you can read it and react.

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. In the church, the concept is striking but unyielding, with the functions of the church forced mercilessly into the symbolic form. Once we have grasped the symbol, there is little else to learn from it. In the Marseilles block, on the other hand, every element of the design serves multiple functions, with structural elements which are also sun screens, space dividers and surface pattern. The richness of the design continually yields new meaning.

I am intrigued by this idea which strikes me as a very fruitful standard of judgement for works of art, more because of its challenge than because of its unchallengeable truth. I applaud anyone who proposes a standard of judgement for art which attempts to encompass both traditional and modern art. Each standard challenges my own subconscious standards, helping me understand both art and my own prejudices.

As standard of greatness in art based on levels of meaning would immediately challenge all art we can classify as minimalist. The essential forms of Brancusi and Mondriaan depend for their force and perfection on the elimination of everything irrelevant. There is a striving for perfection, for the archetype, and when an artist achieves it we recognize the purity, the "hard won simplicity" as greatness. But perhaps these works are not really univalent; they force us to consider the full meaning of each line, each juxtaposition of form, achieving a richness in simplicity.

Well, what about Andy Warhol? His "borrowings" are aggressively unaltered, untransformed, except by the act of reproducing them and placing them in a gallery. For me, the image itself is quickly exhausted of any new levels of aesthetic experience; I know the image by heart and can turn away from it in a moment without loss. But the implications on other levels are richly thought-provoking. He is asking us to look freshly at our daily visual environment, and to begin to understand what it means about who we are and how we deal with images on a daily basis. Can we really handle an image rich in meaning if we are trained by our culture to proccess thousands of images quickly and superficially?

Then there are minimalists like Mark Rothko, whose color field works over many years seems to devote themselves to the juxtaposition of one or two colors displayed against a ground tone. Why are they so compelling? The answer seems to be that he chooses combinations that are alive, that "do something". What is really in front or really behind? Are the squares of color swelling? How does the choice of colors accord with or conflict with our sense of gravity?

But what I know about myself is that I prefer the richness of levels of meaning to the purity and simplicity of a single idea perfectly expressed. I will always respond more to Rauschenburg than to Rothko, to Klee rather than Mondriaan. It is also what I love most about nature itself: complex beyond comprehesion, but full of suggested patterns, possibilities, in short, levels of meaning.

Paul Klee is fascinating in his exploration of the basic elements of art - line, color, shape - but never forgetting the full richness of their possibilities. There is always texture, movement, the suggestion of space, the possibility of association. There is always the richness of seeing the process of making recorded in the final work. And there is alwys the whimsy which speaks of a dialogue with the emerging image, rather than the grand plan. I feel like I am creating the work with him, seeing a line trun into a grid, a grid become a surface, seeing each color suggest the next.His art is a wonderful melding of analysis and understanding, on the one hand, and impulse and intuition on the other.

I like levels of meaning in a work. I'll go beyond that to say that in images on a 2-dimensional surface, the tension between the demands of the surface and the evocation of our three-dimensional world are probably the richest source of ambiguity and levels of meaning. What separates the still lives of Chardin, or a century later of Cezanne, from the ordinary is our lively awareness of their position in the frame, their control of the surface shapes as well as the elements of form.

I know why Degas and Cezanne are my favorite artists of the impressionist era. They exploit this tension between the surface and the described reality to its utmost. Since the two levels of meaning are ultimately polar opposites, if you are unwilling to sacrifice one to the other, the result is a visible struggle, as satisfying as it is demanding. There are many other levels of meaning in the works, based on association, narrative, the psychological impact of color, but the life and death struggle of the space and the surface is for me the most exciting.

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.

Are you a niche artist? Do you, like Vermeer, have a trademark subject which instantly identifies the work as yours? There is a lot to be said for it: you can get very good at it, you know your market, and buyers looking for a certain item or subject are much more likely to find you. It has worked really well for artists in the past who were good but not great, who understood their strengths and limitations. George de la Tour made a name for himself doing paintings lit by a single source, a candle, within the frame.

The best examples are the little Dutch masters, who all carved out a niche. Vermeer himself was one in spirit, though his genius raises him to the level of greatness beyond and doubt. Cuyp specialized in landscapes with cattle (he turned out an excellent cow), while Terborch was known for his superior rendering of satin.

Periodically I wonder if I should try to become a niche artist. When I am in a fallow period, trying to prime the pump, I always think I should return to what I do best...whatever that is. There's the rub: if I chose a niche, what would it be?

I have had many "specialties", favorite subjects to return to. I have also had many people tell me what they think is my best thing is. However, their advice invariably reflects their taste at least as much as my expertise, and tends to spread itself evenly across my subject areas.

My first specialty was portraits; I concentrated on portraits through my college and graduate student years, and have always kept at it. There are regularly people I meet whose faces make me itch to paint them, and a lot of my portraits are the result of my asking someone to sit. I also do house portraits, animal portraits, even portraits of cars and motorcycles! But portrait commissions have never dominated my art business.

Architecture has always had a special place in my work; I love structure in all its manifestations, but particularly when it leads to unintended conjunctions and compositions, as in old mills and decaying barns. Actually, my millscapes are the subject area which has led to my highest percentage of sales. That would be one way to choose.

If I look at my landscape work over the years, what stands out are the skies, the dramatic clouds. My favorite landscape painter from the past is John Constable, and the skies are clearly what distinguishes his works from all others. My landscapes have been called gloomy, but I don't see them that way. The clouds are a marvellous instrument for the expression of energy, of feelings, and for the harmonization of all the colors found below.

My great passion in 2009 was rocks and rockfaces, which are also a source of accidental structural elements. Rocks have had an almost spiritual attraction for me for a long time: I collect them, display them, build with them. The house which I now live in with my wife, which we designed ten years ago, is centered around a monumental fieldstone hearth, built entirely from rock I collected myself. Every rock has its own character, much like the character in a weathered face.

But wait! I have just returned from a visit to Stowe, painting and skiing, so it is very clear to me at the moment that snow is the thing I do best...maybe. I love winter, I love what snow does to transform a landscape, I love how it both modifies and creates light, how it makes pattern in the alternation of dark and light. I can feel that I will now be doing snowscapes in the coming days, rich with lavendars in the shadow, warm with creamy tones in the late light. I can't wait to milk again the magic of snow.

So is that my niche? For the moment it will be. Or should I do just boulders in the snow, or old barns in the snow? It's niche work for the time being, until the next passion comes along. For me, the passion trumps the niche.

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.

If you go to the featured blogs page, there are search categories down the lefthand side of the page, letting you search for articles on business, technique, art and so on. These are helpful, but to explore the writings of a given contributor, you need to click on their name - in my case, Peter Barnett. This gives you the subset of all their posts; it also gives you the ability to do a subsearch based on "Tags". The subsearch will get you to a specific topic group.

My earliest (and longest) series is called "Image and Meaning"; there are 26 of them. Each compares works by two artists treating essentially the same subject, and talks about differnt artistic choices made to reflect a different message. You could say this group comes directly from my past life as an art historian, and includes many comparisons which I would have shown to my classes. An example is the two works shown here: balcony scenes by Goya and Manet. Manet made a regular practice of referring to earlier works of art, but transforming them to totally change their content.

Another series of posts has the topic "Plein-Air Tips". These are practical tips from my own experience as a plein-air artist. Since these build upon each other to a degree, I suggest that someone calling up this group begin at the bottom of the list and work up to the top. I can imagine that an artist beginning to work out doors might be interested in reading through the whole set.

A third series I called "Favorite Artists". Each post deals with the works of a single artist, or in a few cases a group like "the little Dutch Masters". Of course, if your interest is to find comments on a particular artist, you can find him and call him up by name from within the list of Tags.

The rest are either smaller series, or posts without a clear group. There is a small series on famous patrons in the arts, another on the nature and appeal of landscape as a subject. The way to see if there is anything you might enjoy looking at is to browse through the list of tags; there are dozens of them. I would like to think there are a few of you out there who might enjoy an hour of browsing through my attic.

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. With the invention of mechanical perspective and foreshortening, Renaissance artists were able to to create a convincing illusion of the world as it appears to our eyes a stunning leap forward from previous depictions of the world. Within a century, Caravaggio had upped the stakes by forcing that reality out from behind the picture plane, invading our space and demanding an immediate and visceral reaction. The power of these images is that we as viewers are necessarily involved whether passively as spectators or actively as participants, because the image is shown to us through our own eyes. Art based on the camera is the logical extension of this definition, because the camera is a surrogate eye, our eye.

It is hard for us to remember how many other definitions of reality there can are. We can see them in the choices artists have made throughout art history; but we no longer think of them as "realistic". Students being exposed to past artistic traditions often assume that artists have been "trying to be realistic" but failing, when they were in fact practicing a kind of realism we no longer understand.

Before the advent of Renaissance naturalism, the most pervasive approach to representation was what has been called "essential realism". This is what we see in painting and relief sculpture form Egypt and Assyria to the far east. There is no notion of limiting the image to the depiction of a single viewpoint; instead, the most essential elements of the subject are combined to create its "most real" totality. The Egyptian depiction of Torus is a good example: it combines the most characteristic shapes of the foot, the leg, the torso, the shoulders and the head, some which we would see in a side view, others in a frontal view. The "head on" eye in a profile face is a perfect paradigm of the approach: the canine head can only be "really" described in profile; the eye is only most real from the front. It is interesting to see Picasso revisiting this approach by putting two fullface eyes in a profile head.

Another challenge to our concept of the real is found in the approach seen in ethnic art from around the world, notably in African Masks. This approach has sometimes been called "magical realism". The artist is not content to "represent" his subject, he wants to embody it, to give it a vessel or a home. The mask "is" the spirit it depicts, much as the bread and wine of the Eucharist are the body and blood of Christ. Of course, since this goes beyond what science can understand or verify, it is labelled superstition and dismissed...but the power of the masks are undeniable. I find an echo in works by artists like Klee.

But the Western tradition itself is by no means monolithic in its definition of reality. For Plato, who can be seen as the father of all our philosphy, the visible world is far from real; it is like shadows projected on the wall of a cave. Each physical instance of an object like a tree, or a person, is just an imperfect approximation of the reality, the essential tree or man. This "idealism", which values the paradigm above the individual instance, led to the strong classical core which runs through western art.

In the Renaissance itself we see the conflict between the individual or ideosyncratic, represented by the art of the north, and the ideal, championed by Italian art. Both traditions are infected with the new fascination with observed reality, but in the north this fascination raises the love of the particular to a level not acceptable to Italian artists like Leonardo, who thought they were wonderful in detail, but had not concept of what was important and what was trivial.

In the 19th century was see other competing definitions of the real arise to challenge the established tradition. One is "social realism", which basis its challenge less on artistic approach than on subject matter. To a social realist like Courbet, the most "realistic" depictions by David or Ingres are simply out of touch with "the real world". If you are depicting gods and heroes, then you have no right to call your work realistic.

The impressionists, notably Monet, came up with yet another radical challenge to the realistic tradition, based on the new understanding of perception, of the mechanics of vision. To an impressionist, our first unspoiled perception is the truest, before it becomes contaminated by interpretation based on habit and experience. It may not be "Reality" with a capital "R", but it is as close as we can come with our eyes. The visible world is impulses of color and light; we only "think" it is a tree. In fact, we think it INTO a tree, in our mind.

At this same time the camera came into its own, coloring the way we see, and leading ultimately to the emergence of photorealism. It certainly confirmed the underlying assumption of the world seen from a point of view; the camera, like the eye itself, is by definition tied to a point of view. But as we use this wonderful tool, lets try not to forget all the other definitions of reality which wait for our attention.

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. So, how do you plan your most important career move?

The work shown above is the great masterpiece by Gericault, an artist of the romantic period who died young. He wasn't alone: romantic artists, musicians and poets died young in droves. It has been said that any romantic worth his salt died either at age 27 or age 37 (give or take a year). There are many important exeptions, but also much truth. The Romantics made a fetish of burning the candle at both ends, burning fiercely but not long. This makes for great postmortem PR.

Other artists have died young to great effect. One certainly is "the Divine Raphael", who will always be remembered for defining the ideal High Renaissance moment. There were signs that he knew he would have to move on: his late work was showing mannerist "anti-Raphael" tendencies. If we compare "The Burning of the Borgo" with his earlier "School of Athens", we see the High Renaissance moment beginning to crumble.

If Raphael left behind an image of perfection, Caravaggio left behind a violent personal history and a body of work overflowing with youthful energy and passion. In a few short years he, like Raphael a century earlier, had enormous influence on his contemporaries such as Rembrandt. Rembrandt's early rendering of the "Supper at Emmaus" theme is unthinkable without Carravaggio's earlier statement. However, the long-lived Rembrandt goes on to a mature, much more profound statement in his later years. What priceless wealth would have been lost if Rembrandt had died young!

The archetypal example of an artist dying young is certainly Van Gogh. The romantics may have burned their candle fiercely; Van Gogh outdid them. It is stunning to think that there are barely ten years between his "early" "Potato Eaters" and his "late" "Olive Grove". Far from a single perfect moment as with Raphael, Van Gogh seems to have had a full and varied career compressed into a decade.

It is fascinating to compare him to his "contemporary" Monet (Monet was a generation older, but lived a generation longer). Monet used the full extent of his long life to define and develop his impressionist approach, exploring it with a thoroughness seldom seen in the annals of art. His series, such as the "Haystacks" and "Waterlilies", fully explore the rich possibilities of the notion of truth as perceptual reality.

It is equally fascinating to compare Van Gogh, a constant self-portraitist, with Rembrandt, who was equally interested in studying himself. Though Van Gogh was not fated to watch himself grow old, he nevertheless compiled an impressive study of his intensity and his illness. Rembrandt's self-portraits, on the other hand, grow in poignancy and profundity as he ages, becoming a fantastic catalogue of the process of aging and decay.

So, when to die? If you are passinate and intense, burning brightly, you may want to be planning a timely untimely death. If on the other hand you see yourself as engaged in a thorough and ever more profound exploration of your theme, you may want to hold off on the tuberculosis. Unless, of course, you can't wait for your fame and riches.

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. It is very ironic that the still life shown above is titled "Perishables"; they are indeed perishables, but in her vision they will never perish. They have become eternal.

The foundation of her approach is meticulous study of the subject, and control of the light. Of course, still life is the paradigm of artistic control, where everything can be set up exactly as you wish, and lit unchangeably over time. It is probably in still lives that I come closest to the vision of permanence, but even there I bring my natural habit of seeing and recording quickly. Christina has the meticulousness and perfect resolution of all the great still life painters from Claez and Heda to Chardin.

The fundamental staple of academic training is study of the human figure. I have also studied the figure over the years, but here our approaches are more obviously divergent. She has told me that there are 60 hours of work with the model in this charcoal study; I find that well before an hour has passed I have nothing further to record. My best studies are about 20 minutes, enough time to develop the modelling and light, but not to lose the freshness of the first vision. When I try to go beyond 30 minutes, everything goes downhill.

Portraits create yet another balance between the eternal and the transient. To capture an individual, it is important to grasp the uniqueness of a person, which is often seen only in transitory gestures and expressions. Christina's portraits are very sensitive to this transitory data; they don't aim to be eternal in the sense of eliminating everything momentary. But still, to complete her meticulous vision, she needs to control the light and to fix it, in this case with a photograph.

I don't know if Christina has worked in landscape; I haven't seen any. Landscape painting is the least amenable to the kind of contol and stability that she seeks in her work. I recently sold a landscape sketch of the Connecticut River at the opening of my show "Nature's Drama". The buyer wasn't sure why it attracted him more than the others; I speculated that it was because I had to be quicker and stop sooner than usual. It is a scene of scudding clouds and broken light, changing minute by minute. I need to understand and accept that this is my natural vision, what I can do best.

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.

My collaboration was with Adam, a delightful and exuberant young man in his early 20's. It took place at Riverside Studios in Easthampton, MA, which serves this population. I decided that I would like to give Adam free reign to work in his own way, and therefore suggested we do simultaneous portraits of each other.

He agree enthusiastically and without hesitation. How refreshing! In years of teaching art to all ages, a common frustration is how reluctant people are to risk failure with their own art. Something about art is too personal; failure would reflect too much on your worth as a person. People can admit freely to terrible spelling or no math skills, but will hardly dare to try to draw or paint.

Adam will try anything with total unselfconsciousness. He has acted in many plays, is a professional wrestler, and loves "Wheel of Fortune", mostly it seems for the design of the wheel itself. When I suggested we sign our works, he was fascinated, so I told him about how artists often sign their work with a name or a monogram. He asked what a monogram was, so I demonstrated how I might turn my initials into a monogram. Within a minute he had developed a monogram from his own initials.

In two 90 minute sessions, Adam and I ended up doing two portraits each, with Adam completing his own his own between meetings. We will donate one pair to Best Buddies, and exchange one pair between ourselves. I look forward to seeing him again at CityStage.

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. There is a strong and deadly inclination to try to put colors down on canvas as you see them. When you do, you quickly reach the limits of your palette, and have nothing in reserve for the accents which will make the picture work.

Save your accents! Resist the tendency to compete, and don't put pure color on the canvas until the end, when you can decide where it should go. Time and again I have failed to take my own advice, and have ended with an image that shouts but does not sing. Avoid the scenes where there is no foil for the brilliant color; they are stunning but not useful.

Saving your accents is as important with light and dark as it is with color. Another of the moments in nature where it will lead you astray is winter, where snow is a field of white, but cannot be painted pure white if you want to be able to shows its modulations. The most brilliant lights will be a few spots where the sun is reflecting, and if you have nothing left you will lose those accents. Again, it is the urge to compete which is dangerous. Always know the limitations of your palette, and save the brightest and strongest until last.

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. Degas' "Cotton Exchange" is a good example of the new vision: it shows a collection of people with no other connection than to be accidentally in the same place at the same time. There are visual pairs in close proximity but without any spychological or functional relationship. If we compare this with David's "Oath of the Horatii", we can grasp the magnitude of the change in vision.

I should make a distinction here: not all "found" composition is accidental composition. Nature is full of examples of composition which, though it may not have been created primarily for aesthitic reasons, is nevertheless driven by a strong inner logic. Crystals, snowflakes, flower blossoms,trees, even volcanoes are examples of this. Their form and composition is driven by logical imperatives as surely as a suspension bridge, a bicycle wheel or a highway cloverleaf.

I also should say that not all accident succeeds as composition. A great deal of what we find in nature is simply chaotic, with no organizing principle that allows us to make sense of it. For the rest, we will always need to see and extract the compositional possibilites; they are seldom given to us without effort. But even if we organize it to make visual sense, the accidental composition will always present elements that are new to us, teaching us things we wouldn't have thought of through pure invention.

I have recently returned to doing millscapes: views of the mill complex which houses my studio and artists' community. The millscapes combine the progressive alteration of the buildings over time, the accidental conjunction of several elements when seen from a particular viewpoint, and a special richness given by aging and decay. My other concentration has been rockfaces, a surprisingly similar blend of logical structure and accidental decay. I'm am just beginning to understand why these two seemingly different subjects have the same attraction for me.

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.

This was brought home to me last night when I attended an opening for a young artist, Omar Clarke, who is a new member of our artists' community in the Indian Orchard Mills. The theme of his show was the tension between being a black man and being an american. It was interspersed with quotations from the writings of W. E. B. DuBois dealing with this dilemma, and his work had a focus and a power that was due in large part to the seriousness and meatiness of the message. I once again heard that little whisper comparing his "high purpose" with my own lack of "something to say".

Then I had a talk with him, in which I expressed these ideas. His response was fascinating: this is only part of what I want to do; it is focussed because of the theme of the show. It turns out that what fires him up at the moment is an admiration for artists who can convincingly model forms in space such as drapery, distinguish believably between the textures of metal, cloth and flesh. In other words, he is less interested in an outside message at the moment than he is about his craft.

Well now. That is part of what my work is about: recreating the richness and variety of the visual world. Maybe that's all right too! Actually I am usually fine with what seems to be my mission to paint what turns me on in the visual world, to try to give the viewer a chance to see it through my eyes. I am not a missionary or an activist; I just need to accept the validity of the place from which my art springs.

Tonight I am going to another opening, this one at the Dane gallery at the mill. It is called "Transitions", and is the work of four wonderful artists whose work is abstract to semi-abstract figurative pieces. Though some have a strong emotional content, the works do not need any outside purspose to justify their existence; they are a bountiful visual feast satisfying on many purely visual levels. A good dose of Carole, Heidi, Bev and Claudine and I will no longer worry about the higher message. Instead, I will start to question my adherence to external visual truth, to imitation of nature. Oh well.

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. We are drawn into the landscape by many things: by the deep space of the distance, by the path which starts at our feet and leads us in, by the anecdotal incident of the shepherd with his dog stopping for a cool drink, and by the inevitable movement from shadow into light. I'll look in more detail at each of these devices, which became staples of the landscape painter's trade.

The view into deep space is perhaps the first to appear in Western art, since it was common in the fragments of landscape which began to be included in works devoted to other subjects. It is common in Renaissance works in both Italy and the north. Since the figures and the action still take place in the foreground, there is almost the sense of the pull of deep space drawing you away from the subject, even while drawing you into the painting. We see this in Piero della Francesca's "Baptism of Christ", and even moreso in Van Eyke's "Madonna with Chancellor Rollin". In the latter, the attraction of deep space and the interest of the detail there are in continual competition with the foreground action...sort of like trying to have a conversation in a wind tunnel.

In landscape paintings proper, the most obvious device was the pathway leading in for the viewer to follow. We can see this in Piero's Baptism in the form of the stream, and in Dutch landscape paintings like Ruisdael's "View of Amsterdam". The potency of the device is to convince the viewer that the painted space is an extension of his own space, and that nothing prevents him from following the path inward.

In Ruisdael's work, as in the Constable, the effectiveness of the path is increased by providing incidents along the way to engage the viewer's attention. In the Constable it is the boy and his dog and the farmer at the gate; in the Ruisdael it is a fisherman near the bridge you must cross, and other travellers on the road into town. We experience them as we would incidents on a walk in the country, moments which bring the journey into relief.

A slightly different device is the surrogate: the figure in the foreground who is looking at the landscape, and thus becomes you, or your companion. This seems to work best with landscapes which we cannot enter, where we must be observers, such as a panorama. Asher Durand's "Kindred spirits" is an excellent example of this, as we join the artist and the poet in their admiration of the scene.

Perhaps the most powerful device, developed in the Baroque by artists like Claude Lorrain, is the movement from darkness into light. As an example I am showing another Constable, one of his many views of Salisbury Cathedral. By placing the foreground in shadow and allowing us a view into a bright distance, he draws our soul or spirit out of darkness and into light. It is an irresistible pull, rooted in our psyche, and it seems to satisfy some universal longing.

In another landscape by Ruisdael, we see a darker use of the same device. Ruisdael favored stormy somewhat inhospitable landscapes, more in the sublime tradition than the pastoral, and in most of his works he was not in the business of making us comfortable. There is indeed deep shadow in the foreground, but it almost swallows up the background as well. The spot of sunlight in the distance seems to mock us more than to invite us; by the time we reach it it will be gone.

Because of this powerful urge to enter a landscape, the artist can make an equally powerful statement by deliberate exclusion. I am going to show just one example, the "House of the Hanged Man" by Cezanne. Cezanne was concerned with the competition between the description of solid form in space and the reality of the paint on a flat surface, and in this work he dramatizes this conflict by an apparent invitation which is then withdrawn. There seems to be a path from our feet into the cleft of space between the two houses, but when we try to proceed, we run into a wall of paint. The promise of space is an illusion...as of course is any such promise on a flat surface. With Cezanne, you can never forget the paint on the surface.

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. Never before in the social history of art have artists been so completely and so deliberately isolated from the mainstream of their culture. Over the course of the 19th century, artists went from seeking acceptance and approval for their work, to seeking rejection and outrage. For those who considered themselves to be Avant Garde, to be accepted was a sure sign of having sold out.

Where does this come from? It is the fallout of the social phenomenon we call the rise of the middle class, and the mass distribution of images. For the first time, the purchasers of art were not "persons of breeding", not educated in the traditions and sensibilities of the arts. They were, in a word, "Philistines". To cater to their tastes was to mire oneself in sentimentalism and triteness.

Though there had been many previous rumblings, Courbet is a good place to start. He is the first to throw down the gauntlet to the art establishment, creating the "Salon des Refusees", an maverick exhibition of works refused admission to the annual Academy show. His "Studio" is an allegory of the new place of the artist in society, showing among other things a condescending tolerance for his patrons, those few with the perception to understand his greatness. Manet in the next generation, tries to teach the viewing public in his own way, by confronting them with images that are shocking and inexplicable if you insist on approaching them as storytelling. In "Luncheon on the grass", he invites you to get by the discomfort of seeing yourself in an embarassing narrative, and learn to approach the canvas in a new way.

There are two major aspects of the avant garde phenonmenon that I want to touch on. The first is that it spread "horizontally" instead of "vertically". Traditionally, schools or styles had been national or regional, developing intensely in their home area, and perhaps spreading gradually outward. The avant garde turns this process on its head.

An excellent example is the movement at the end of the 19th century known as "Art Nouveau". Significantly, it was named for an avant garde publication (same name) which had an insignificant circulation in its home country - France - but an equal circulation in the other countries of Europe, scandinavia, even the U.S. The English artist Beardsley, was better known by the avant garde in other countries than he was by the vast majority of his countrymen. The designs of the spanish architect Gaudi and the American Louis Sullivan were published in European avant garde magazines before anyone had seen them locally. Even the Scottish architect and designer MacIntosh, working exclusively in Edinburgh, had a loyal following among his peers in many other countries.

This also highlights another "horizontality": the cross-pollination of the arts. Within in the avant garde, writers, musicians, artists and architects were in close communication with each other, more influenced by their peers in the movement than by events in the mainstream of their own media. This cross-pollination is a dominant feature of 20th century cutting edge activity.

A second consequence of the avant garde idea - and its ultimate irony - is what I call "acceptance without understanding". The avant garde created its own worst enemy: the increasingly quick co-opting of each new artistic statement, if not by the general public, at least by the "literati". It aint so easy getting rejected these days! If you tell the view that he is not competent to judge your work, only history is, or perhaps only the artist himself, then you are likely to end up with undiscriminating acceptance. If the stamp of success is to be rejected in your own time, the movement sowed the seeds of its own distruction.

At first, as with Courbet and Manet, it was enough to break with the current establishment. They could be excellent artists, with remarkable painthandling, and simply flout the expectations of the public as to subject matter and treatment. However, within a generation their work was gaining acceptance by art connoisseurs and collectors. With the Impressionists, the acceptance came even faster.

In order to remain true to their avant garde credo, artists were soon driven to extraordinary measures. One ploy was to abandon "craft" and produce unsophisticated work. We see this in dancers by Matisse and by Picasso, who came to the same place from different directions. Maybe you can accept the abandonment of a "good" subject; can you accept the absence of craft?

It was quickly accepted; the work could have truth and power without refinement. The next step was to abandon "making" entirely. Can you accept something as art that isn't even made by the artist? The found objects of Duchamps strike at the heart of the notion of creation. Anything the artist chooses to view as art becomes art by virtue of his choice.

But still you can accept them! You can pay money for them and put them in your collection. Another step - desperation? - is taken when the Dada group handed out axes to the attendees at its exhibition, so that they could demolish the work at the end of the day. And perhaps the final step is found in Conceptual art, where the artist describes what he would do, if he ever were going to do it. I see this as the ultimate "reductio ad absurdum" of Leonardo's notion that it is not the physical creation of the work that is most important, but rather the idea behind it: the invention. I wonder what he would think.

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. Awareness of past historical styles, and the styles of other cultures, was an overwhelming presence. Critics bemoaned the inability of their time to find a style of its own, and there was a longing for the simplicity of working unquestioning in the manner of one's culture and time. There was a wave of envy for the tribal artist, unaware of his origins or choices, and of medieval artisans learning their craft from their masters, generation after generation.

In western art, the "problem" of historical awareness can be seen as beginning with the Renaissance. Classical art, both Greek and Roman, were arguably a continuous tradition evolving through two very different cultures but essentially unbroken. With the Italian Renaissance, however, there was a conscious evocation of the classical past, which they were unearthing through deliberate study and exploration. The Renaissance placed itself consciously in an historical tradition.

At first, this choice was a tremendous boon. For 400 years it led to a wonderfully rich and vital artistic tradition, combined as it was with a wide-ranging humanism and an interest in the direct exploration of nature. In painting particularly, since there were almost no classical artifacts to imitate, the tradition imposed very little in the way of limits on artists.

However, over those 400 years, historical and cultural awareness expanded and increased markedly. There was the development of modern archaeology, and vastly increased contact with other cultures, particularly in the far east and Africa. As the Renaissance tradition began to lose steam in the 18th century, it was infiltrated by a myriad of other stylistic choices, tastes and fads.

The 19th century was a cacophony of styles. In architecture particularly, styles were put on like costumes; we can see this is Downing's "Cottage Architcture" which offers alternate styles for basically the same floor plans. Neoclassicism tried to reaffirm the old verities, while a succession of medieval and non-western styles competed for attention. The academic tration in painting likewise was confused and diluted by a kaleidoscope of influences and arbitrary cultural references. We can see this as a cultural relativism, wherre anythng is possible, but it is also a symptom of a loss of integrity and purpose in the Western tradition.

The answer for many young artists was escape, by any means. Monet and the Impressionists escaped by seeking out the purely visual facts of perception, shortcircuiting the interpretation which would allow the contamination of historical awareness to seep in. Personal expression, the painting of inner truth as we see in Van Gogh, is another escape from conventions of the outer world. Of course, by reacting against the tyrany of historical knowledge they also are emphasizing its power.

Modern art is full of fascinating attempts to free the artist from what he knows, from the past. Picasso, in his "Demoiselles D'Avignon" (top) uses the forms and simplifications of african masks to break from the sophistication of the European tradition. Non-representational art cleansed itself of any associations; in architecture the banishment of all ornament is the same impulse. There is a fascinating treatise by an young architect in the first years of the 20th century, which describes ornament as a fetish of the primitive mind, and the cleansing of ornament as the surest indication of civilization.

One of my favorite attempts is the use of "automatic drawing" to draw out the preconscious sources of form. This is a version of the automatic writing - writing down words with no intentional connection or direction - by which writers were trying to explore the subconscious. An artist like Klee would begin a drawing with no preconception about what would emerge, and then allow the lines, colors and forms on the page to suggest its further elaboration. In "Ventriloquist" we see a play of line, shape and color in which the recognizable forms appear to be the last things added, except for the title itself.

20th century art represents radical surgery for the plague of historical awareness, for which there is no real cure. It offers to artists many ways to ignore the problem of style, and just paint.