The Artist Statement

I stole this poem from other peoples ideas.

This poem incorporates the first lines or the beginning of the first lines of about 30 different artists statements taken roughly in order from a single issue of  ’New American Paintings’.  I kind of wish it was my own artist statement.

 

My paintings are derived

through the narrow slit of a window

we all know that.

My paintings are visual reflections

my world explores the contradictions.

My qouache portraits are

my recent work.

Investigating ideologies and morphing

the paintings are improvised covers.

I attempt to represent a form

for me Painting is essential.

My work expands the limitations

my work has always left a bad taste.

I demonstrate my interest

before I start to work.

I paint pictures by first drawing

relationships between a time.

My work hinges upon an awareness

I have been painting about.

I work to integrate my responses

the allegorical nature of these paintings

I paint meticulously.

These works hover somewhere

for the most part.

My work work addresses.

I approach my painting as a diaristic

overtime.

Be observant, as if

these paintings are from a series.

I explore the layers

a part and a symptom.

The Drawing Ideate Project

IDEATE: verb [ trans. ] [often as adj. ] ( ideated)form an idea of; imagine or conceive 

Drawing is a way for me to generate ideas. It is a process by which I consider new visual relationships. Recently I have begun work on a group of drawings which are originating out of my new studio in Chicago. Being in a new city, a new studio with everything in a new place feels like the ideate trifecta.

These drawings have the visual suggestion of being wildly uncontrolled but actually are not generated simply by chance. In making them I have been using several different types of patterned and repetitive hand movements along with awkward tools such as ink pens loosely taped to the end of a stick and little pieces of ink soaked paper towels dragged and even thrown against the paper. They have a lyrical use of media which generates an unexpected type of line that surprises me. I then try to take advantage of those surprises in the drawing.

Previous to these new drawings I have been working on a series of notional paintings based on 17th century Dutch still life’s. These new drawings refer to my current paintings at times in their botanical and shape references (some look like a volumous flower drawing) and at other times the drawings create new possibilities for the paintings. Both drawings and paintings seem comfortable being contained within the confines of the canvas or the taped off edges of the paper. Sometimes I need a defined play area to get messy in. Both paintings and drawings continue to feed each other.

With these thoughts in mind I have launched “ The Drawing Ideate Project”. Part portfolio, part online store where you may follow my visual progression and even purchase drawings that interest you. I love the daily(usually) practice of drawing and I want you to have one of a bunch of them, so I have made it very easy and extremely, crazy, affordable. See the fine print below and thanks for taking the time to look. 

The Fine Print: All drawings are for sale for $45 including shipping via USPS.( contact me directly to make multiple purchases to save on shipping) Purchases can be made via PayPal (you don’t need a PayPal account) or you can send a check. Go to www.richardkooyman.com and click on > Portfolio > The Drawing Ideate Project. All drawings are identified by title ,image size/ paper size. Questions email me richardkooyman@yahoo.com

Extra Fine Print: This is my first foray into the world of PayPal. If you experience a problem let me know.

ArtPrize: What Was The Experiment?

Rick Devos’s ArtPrize, described as “the the largest Art Competition in the world”, was self billed from the start as a “ radically new experiment. The experiment was basically this, could the general public via a majority vote pick ten top works of Art out of a pool of over 1200 applicants and then award the best of the top ten a grand prize of $250,000. The comparison to the television contest American Idol was down played by Artprize organizers by saying that the competition really wasn’t about the money but rather the public dialog that would ensue from having such a competition. The organized spin didn’t of course alter the fact that Artists did not pay a $50 application fee to dialog with their neighbor but rather to enter a competition and a run for a chance at $450,000 in prize money.

As an Artist this was both a fascinating premise for a competition and a infuriating assault against what I know about Art with a capital A. It was something that I wanted to remain open to for it’s new potential and it was something that flew in the face of my belief that if you are going to judge something in life you should know something of what you are talking about. I’m not talking about your personal opinion. I’m talking about your ability to judge.

If I learned anything from my collage science classes it’s that any experiment has to have a theory by which to test your experiment against. What was ArtPrize’s theory? Was it that the average person on the street can pick a top work of Art as good as any professional critic or curator? Or was the experiment actually an attempt at conservative social engineering by the ultra conservative Devos Foundation who funded the prize money?
For all the denying that Artprize had engineered a referendum against the established Art World, the idea remains that this model of Art Competition attempts to replace knowledge with public opinion about what is good Art. How dangerous you believe that premise is might point to which side of the argument you reside on.

The Artprize organizers from the inception of the event seemed invested in the idea of organizing a Art Competition through new technological means. They created a model with exciting sounding procedures that stacked up buzz phrases like “rebooting” and “decentralized curating”. Exhibition spaces were called “Venues” and Artists and Venues were “ matched” online like an online dating service. Cool.

ArtPrize was said to be “open to any Artists who can find a space”. This open call concept ended up not quite being the case and in reality Venues acted as entry jurors selecting who they wanted to exhibited before the public ever saw anything. Some Venues employed professional jurors with curatorial experience and some Venues were “curated” by people or committees that may not have had any Art experience at all.
“Decentralized curating” to AP must also mean mystery curating because the public was never given an idea which Venues were professionally curated nor was there any credit given to who the curators were.
That being said it was easy to tell the Venues that had been professionally curated from those that had not. The best Venues I saw ( I did not see all of AP. It is mentally impossibly and logistically difficult) was the UICA and The Old Federal Building both which were curated by UICA curatorial volunteers. Why these curators weren’t considered important enough to be paid for their services must be part of AP’s new “decentralized curating” model.

I believe Art can be a lot of different things and it can be found in a variety of unexpected and non traditional places. Thats exciting. But that doesn’t mean that anything is Art and that art can exist or be placed anywhere.

A bar propping up a painting in a window like a cheap department store display does not a meaningful Art experience make. And there are certain architectural features inherit in particular Venues that should have prevented them from hosting Artists. The West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology was a awful place to exhibit work. Two artist’s work was stuffed in a stair well in the building and the remaining work is hung wherever physically possible. Armin Mersmann’s formal yet personal drawings and Tim Portlock’s large format prints “Ghost City #1 and #2” suffered from being exhibited there. Plus the place at lunch time smelled like a office workers Spaghetti- O’s.

But good art displayed poorly is still more tolerable than bad art displayed badly and the Venue know as The B.O.B was of that ilk. A three story bar restaurant complex made the Art work seem like bad theme decor and their adjacent parking lot looked like a sad amateur Art Fair after a thunder storm. For all I know there might have been something interesting in The B.O.B but it was lost in a black hole of seafood smelling, canned music banality.

So what was the outcome of this years “radically new experiment”? Was the general public able to pick a fair sampling of at least the ten best works of Art worthy of a cash prize. In my professional opinion no. The grand prize winner Ran Ortner;s “Open Water No.24 was deserved and an easy pic for Michigan -The Great Lakes State.

Who were my favorites? I’ve listed them below and have a sadden feeling when I think of them having been so over looked. None of them made the top ten.

Brooklyn Artist Anja Mohn’s (www.re-title.com/artists/Anja-Mohn.asp) “One Another” a black and white photographic female image embedded into blocks of paraffin wax was reflectively beautiful and seemed suspended in time and should have been given more exhibition space.

Dragana Crnjak’s wall work “ I Thought I Might Find You” was a show stopper. Composed of painted and charcoal drawn shapes. It was one of the finest pieces in ArtPrize. The wall installation painting was done on a wall 12 ft tall by some 70ft long where the actually images and design were well integrated into the physical space. Her use of small oval charcoal shapes with 3-dimensional shadow aspects to them was optically alluring. It was joyous.(www.markelfinearts.com/port.php?id=33)

My very favorite piece in AP and my vote for the best was Ann Arbor Artist Heidi Kumao’s “Correspondence”. Part video image, part sculpture, part theater it was perfectly situated in a small semi dark alcove where a video was projected onto both the back wall and a bell jar on a small metal table. Your eye and attention was led between the action and colorful and animated images on the back wall and a separate world projected onto a sheet of paper in the bell jar. I would have spent a whole day in bed looking at this magical theatricality with it’s visual poetry.

Kurt Perchke’s “Red Ball Project” seemed like a interesting idea and I wish I could have found where the ball was that day because the documentation lacked what the experience must have been like. (www.redballproject.com)

The day I visited The Old Federal Building top ten winners Ran Ortner and Eric Daigh were garnering steady crowds that should have been looking at Chicago Artist J. Thomas Pallas’s “Jordan”. A 14ft by 10ft drawing made directly on the wall in the image of a woman’s face. The image was drawn with a hand inked stamp of Michael Jordan which was pressed onto the wall thousand of times to create the image. It was stunningly epic in scale and purpose. (www.jthomaspallas.com/home.html)

Viewers also should have been paying attention to Reni Gower’s “Papercuts”. Three large sheets of paper cut out of Celtic patterns that hung away from the wall and reflected a colored glow from the painted back surfaces. This was a particularly brilliant installation where the size and objects worked intimately with the space and the lighting of that space. More installations should have been this sensitive to the space given them. (www.renigower.com)

I also loved the personal world expanding Jerry Gretzinger’s Map Project (www.jerrysmap.blogspot.com/) and Megan Heeres “Things that go back and forth” comprised of things that..well… moved back and forth. These “things”, shapes, sculptures,paintings were like new sensory objects to my eyes, seen for the first time. And Grand Rapids artist Sam Blanchard’s David Lynch like roller coaster sculpture sat eerily in a darkened room. It reminded me of both a futurist event and something out of antiquity.

Dennis Michael Jones’s participatory room installation “Sometimes I Wonder” had word drawings that people were invited to add to. It was directly up front and refreshingly dynamic,both seemingly simple and socially complex in context. He should have been given a larger room.

Kudo’s to Yolanda Gonzales’s “Dress like the Sky”, Danielle Roney’s “Cybertourism”, Claire Walkins’s “Think Three Thoughts at Once”, and Erika Blumfeld’s “Apparent Horizons: Antarctica” who made my short list also.

Kendall Collage of Art displayed 5 subtle oil paintings by Jenny Brillhart (www.jbrillhart.com/) from Miami. The paintings were partial views of swimming pools empty of their water. The soft glow of her paint reminded me of old worn pool tiles.
Unfortunately to get to them you had to walk past Paul Kaiser’s large scale photo realistic drawings of portrait busts of American soldiers in uniform which smacked to much of creepy war idolatry and the G.W.Bush years.

As I drove away from Downtown I passed a sad hand lettered sign pointing down a side street. It said something like “ More good Artprize Artists this way” begging for my attention. And while the majority of Grand Rapids natives feel Rick Devos should be awarded a prize himself for bringing a cash cow to this midwestern town it seems depressing that we even have to have an event like Artprize to make people believe they can look at and have a conversation about Art. This would be a myth that I would not want to see future events like ArtPrize propagate. Because you don’t have to wait for Artprize to tell you can look at Art. Art doesn’t leave the City of Grand Rapids, the State of Michigan and the region of the Midwest when ArtPrize closes down this year. Believe it or not it was here before ArtPrize came to town. The great new Grand Rapids Art Museum, the UICA and Grand Rapids Art Galleries, Artist studios work diligently everyday to get your attention to focus on Art. The world class Art center of Chicago is only a 3 hour drive away. New York City is a short 4 hour flight.
You don’t need ‘Sticks’ Furniture on steroids plopped up on a bridge and Styrofoam monsters in the river to make you want to look and think and talk about Art. You can do it on your own. And you should.

Why the Grand Rapids ‘ArtPrize’ isn’t a Prize.

 

When I was young man in the 70’s Grand Rapids, Michigan suffered the decline many midwestern cities did of urban flight and a decaying empty downtown. In 1969 Grand Rapids became the first city in the United States to install a public work of art through the National Endowment for The Arts  ‘Art for Public Places’ program. The sculpture chosen was Alexanders Calder’s  ‘LaGrande Vitesse’. Originally it caused a immense controversy which is showcased in the PBS American Masters Series available on DVD.  Eventually the energy and vitality of downtown Grand Rapids was rebuilt with major contributions by the Devos family. Last week Rick Devos grand son of one of the founders of the Amway Corporation announced ArtPrize “the worlds largest art prize”. A international art competition that will award close to $500,000 in prize money with the top prize being $250,000. The ArtPrize web site states that it’s mission is to..

“reboot a conversation between artists and the public on a grand scale.”

What is unique in Rick Devos’s idea is a international competition where the public will decide the awards similar to the ‘American Idol” talent competition where the public decides who wins the big prize.

The prize money is being funded by the Dick & Besty Devos Foundation, Rick Devos’s parents. The Devos’s have a deep history of charitable and political contributions mostly involving Christian organizations and have been contributors to James Dobeson’s Focus on the Family Ministries and have made contributions supporting California’s Proposition 8.  

“Our family sees ArtPrize as a new and innovative way to engage and support the arts for the future,” said Betsy DeVos. The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation is underwriting ArtPrize. “Dick and I share our son’s vision for encouraging everyone to explore the arts in a truly democratic way.”                         Artprize website

I’m not sure art has ever been, or ever should be ‘democratic’,  but I certainly am all for  supporting anything that creates a conversation between art, artists and the viewing public. But a conversation, a dialog about art and it’s purpose in society is one thing. Giving the power to the public to be judge and jury to not only the prize money but the entry to the contest is a completely different thing. 

And this is the first problem I have with ArtPrize. It’s not really what it says it is.  When ArtPrize was announce it was billed as a open art event where the public would decide the prize winners.  But you have to get into the ArtPrize first and your first juror is the venue owners. After applying to ArtPrize ($50 application fee) it is the artists responsibility to contact a venue from a list provided on the website. Or you can contact anyone who owns property within the city of Grand Rapids and “negotiate” a venue agreement. Artists are responsible for shipping, installing and insuring their work during the event,but here is the kicker– the person who owns the venue decides who and what they want in their venue. Good luck finding a public venue in this conservative town if your work is overtly political or sexual or anti- religious. The owners of the venue then become your first juror.  Ok, this is America and you can’t make the religious Calvin College show a painting called “I hate Jesus” if they don’t want to have that hanging in their campus gallery. I can respect that. But then ArtPrize shouldn’t really bill ArtPrize as a international competition open to anyone.

$250,000 is a lot of money. $500,000 in total prizes is a whole lot of money. It’s not play money. The purpose of offering that kind of award I guess, if I can speak for the Devos’s is to show that ArtPrize is serious about attracting great art, and great artists to Grand Rapids. It’s an attempt to bring a high quality art event and showcase Grand Rapids the same way the Sundance  Festival showcases Sundance. So the question begs to be asked- is the public the best  jury for the “worlds largest art prize”.  And subsequently-what is the point of having them do so?  Will it be fun for the public? Absolutely. Will it be interesting to the public. I’m sure it will be. But is it the right thing to do? I don’t think so. Here’s why.

Artists are as serious and professional about what they do as any other important profession. Art has a history.  Art deals with issues of relevance, aesthetics and purpose. Art questions who we are and what we do. There are reasons for why artists do what they do. There are even reasons for the reasons why they make what they make. Some of those reasons are simple, easy to understand and assimilate. Some of those reason are harder, more obtuse, more deeply ingrained in the history of art and the history of why art is made. There are professional experts, historians, critics, art writers and artists that spend their whole lives writing about art, trying to assess and come to a full understanding about the practical and philosophical reasons behind art, what make good art good and bad art bad. If ArtPrize wants, as they say in their mission statement  a “giant conversation ” you need to include this professional aspect of art, not exclude them by a overwhelming vote of popularity. Is the implied professionalism in the the title  “ the largest art prize in the world” compatible with a popularity vote? 

The ArtPrize mission  suggest that we are in a time of great change and we need new ideas and fresh inspiration… 

”we developed a radically open framework for this event, which gives power to everyone’s opinion When everyone’s opinion counts, everyone is included in the conversation.”  

There is a very big difference I feel between a conversation, a dialog about art between artists and viewers, and giving someone the power to decide what is and what is not the best art in the show. I know from my own experience that I approached many artists and artworks over the years not being able to understanding something about the work, not even liking the work, only to have it become some of my very favorite work, years later. I just wasn’t ready for it. I just didn’t have the ability, the knowledge, the patience, to fully appreciate the work. I grew to appreciate it. I became more educated, more knowledgeable. There is a major flaw in the ArtPrize organizers attitude about the public and judging art. Sometimes, as the public, we are just not able to fairly judge what we are seeing.  Should we have the public decide  what books the Grand Rapids library should or should not buy this year? Why not have next years Nobel Prizes awarded by the public? I think most sane people would agree that it would be a bad idea to do so.

I appreciate the ArtPrize interest in a fresh dialog about art. I also appreciate their attempt to bring up for discussion the reality that for a lot of people there is a disconnect between art that exists in the professional art world and art that they would like to have in their homes. But the reality also is that Grand Rapids is a very conservative town. I’m not making a judgement. Just stating a fact. It’s been the lunch stop for every Republican President for years. It’s a highly religious mid-western city.  Is Artprize going to draw enough progressive, art educated, viewers(voters must register at the event in person) to balance out the overwhelming conservative votes?  Or will this simply be  “a conversation” between the artist and those conservative locals who show up? 

25 Things About My Favorite Tubes of Paint

1. Burnt Umber is like cooked mud but in a good way. Hard to find a use for cooked mud but when you need it nothing else will do.

2. Quinacridone Red. I never have been able to pronounce its name.

3. Phthalo Blue. I use to think this color was like poison. Open the tube and it spreads like a virus all over everything. Now I thinks its eye candy. Its like the Altoids of paint.

4. Corbet Green. Is the color of a dank, dark wet basement in July.

5. Cadmium Reds, Oranges and Yellows (all of them). These guys and girls are like the Sex Pistols of paint. They are always clamoring over each other scratching to get to the top of the pile always screaming with spittle coming out of their mouths “Use me you $&#%&@# wanker”.

6.Sap green is the Mezzo -soprano of greens. Mellow, middle ranged.

7.Permanent Green Light is the Lyric soprano of greens capable of high, fast coloratura.

8.Phthalo Green. The Bruce Springsteen of greens. This green puts on a long show.

9. Naples Yellow Light. What can you say about such a versatile color. It is my friend.

10. Naples Yellow. Naples Yellow Light’s big brother. You think you always might need him but he gets in the way a lot.

11. Burnt Sienna. Burnt Sienna is alchemy. Its toast and jam smashed together and baked in a cast iron pressure cooker for 100 years until it crumbles and it still taste good.

12. Unbleached Titanium. Such a unmacho color. Its the color of a Mocha Napoleon at Fabiannes Cafe in Williamsburg.

13. Kings Blue. You may think you can mix this color yourself. Go ahead and try. You can’t. Its the king.

14. Chromium Green. What is up with this green? You squeeze out a dollops, you turn your back for a second and you have two dollops. You dip the tiny tip of your brush in it and touch it on the canvas and 1/3 of the canvas is covered.

15. Cold Black Earth. Carl Plansky got the name to this color wrong. It should be called Fuzzy Warm Cold Black Earth And I Like It Very Much. FWCBEAILIVM for short. Not much harder to say than Quinacridone.

16. Yellow Ochre. The butter of all paint. Anything and I mean anything is better with butter Am I right?

17. Cobalt Blue. She is such a tease. You always think its her but it never is.

18. Alizaron Crimson. Is the MSG of colors. It makes a lot of things look better but your not sure if you should or shouldn’t use it but you always feel ok the next day so you use it anyway.

19. Mars Orange. The trickster. Not really brown. Not really orange and I just found out from a good source that it doesn’t come from Mars at all.

20. Spanish Earth. Ah, yes, the dead soul of the earth trampled with blood and pounded flat by the feet of dancing gypsy women.

21. Violets (any of them). The trans genders of colors. Not really reds and not really blues. I feel ill prepared to use them. I want to but I’m too scared.

22. Pompeii Red. It just runs around singing, “I’m too sexy for you”.

23. Zinc buff. The color of wet beach sand in the late morning.

24. Juane Brilliant. The Javiar Bardem of paints. And he has three sisters No.1, No.2 and No.3

25.Titanium White. The delete key of color.

Self Expression- Peculiar and Unexpected Ways

As a child I place a pencil on the paper and make a mark. No judgment, no preconceived idea, no plan. Is it simple play or something more primordial?

Joseph Campbell said that the folk are led by artists. The people consequently respond to what the artists makes but the artists lead. The mark leads.  As an artist you come to the realization that you either lead with your mark or you are just following the person in front of you. That realization can be either inspirational or painful. Maybe both at times.  What is self expression?  Does the power of art reside in self expression or in the expression of the material itself, regardless of who the self  is?  

We are not  born with material knowledge . We explore that freely as children.  The desire to make something  be ‘special’, the scholar Ellen Dissanayake says, is the reason the world makes art. We intuitively know it is special until we are sadly taught otherwise.  When and how did the statement ‘Art is a talent you are born with’  become an excuse for believing you don’t have talent? 

One does not  have to master  materials before you can create something beautiful. In this sense art has always been about what happens in the process of making. What you have to try to master is the ability to see what is beautifully happening during  the process. This may be what children have and adults lose as they mature. We are taught not to trust ourselves. We judge and are critical of what should be natural.  As a elementary school child I was taught to draw a Thanksgiving turkey by tracing my hand on the paper, the teacher showing me how it was best done.  No wonder I’m such a mess.

Instead of using materials to express our self  we should think in terms of  our self expressing the materials. The difference is subtle and changes the way I think about art. Art is not art therapy.  Art in itself  is therapeutic but not in the sense of a treatment.  In T.S.Eliot’s essay  ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ published in 1920,  he contends that the best art is art made when the self gets out of  its own way.  “The process of an artists is continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”.   This seems to be quite a different explanation of the creative process than what I was taught.  Eliot writes, “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the man who creates; the more perfectly the mind will digest and transmute the passions which are his material.”   Hans Hoffman said that the artists technical problem is “how to transform the material…back into the sphere of the spirit.”  The self transmutes but the material transforms.

Stories abound of painters, writers, and dancers who after  years of practice and struggle break through to something new and exciting.  Their relationship with their medium has gone through the transformation that Hoffman speaks of.  This, as Eliot explains,  has more to do with the expression of the artists use of materials than the expression of the self.  “The poet(artist) has, not a  ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impression and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”   Unfortunately having a great personality does not guarantee that you will make great art.

Eliot’s  “experiences” combined in “peculiar and unexpected ways”   helps me explain in simple terms the act of  painting.  Painters explore new combinations, treatments of paint, brush work and compositions in “peculiar and unexpected ways” that they may not always understand. You are led to something new and exciting by not knowing where you are going. We enter the unknown, where things get both frightening and exciting.  This is counterintuitive to what I was taught as a child.  I was shown it was important to plan, organize, test, reassess, and have a back up plan.  I do some of that also when I make a painting but I  want to be willing… no I want to be brave enough, to chuck all of it and fly blind.  It is only in this type of  foggy consciousness which hovers just above what is subconscious that poetry is formed.  Its our primordial soup.  Its the swampy bog of  possibilities which we crawl out of  to join those who have come before us.  Eliot believed that the poet is formed by the “peculiar and unexpected ways”  of  the generations that have come before. And when the modern poet or artist puts their mark down they effect  all of the history that came before them as they, in turn, were effected by all who proceeded them. It’s like adding your building block to a continuum of changing and growing consciousness. You are formed by what has come before you and you will form those who come after.  Its a big beautiful cosmic art plan. A big, world changing  plan that your -self and my -self can participate in.  And you get to make a turkey picture  anyway you want to.

 

 

 

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Aesthetics

 

“Aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.’

Fairfield Porter 

 

I have always, it seems, done battle with personal taste in art. Either I’m trying to figure out just what I think about art or I am trying to understand someone else’s ideas. What has helped calm my mind is understanding the difference between one’s taste or opinions about art and one’s aesthetics about art. My opinions are simply that- opinions. My aesthetics are how I go about thinking and looking at art.

My first big battle with taste was in undergraduate school  during the early 80′s when I was a ceramic major. The department was split into two factions. There were those who made functional pots and those who made ‘art’. As a student there was this underlying  pressure to pick a camp and commit to its ideology.  If you were a ‘clay artists’ making pots was too old school and lacked the room for creative self expression. The potters, on the other hand, saw themselves as part of a valuable tradition and thought it sacrilegious to make something out of clay that wasn’t part of that tradition. Taste it seemed was both a personal judgment and a sociological concept. We were young, impressionable and frankly did not know our heads from holes in the ground. Neither did our instructors who were guilty of fueling the whole stupid debate. We were being taught taste.

Off to graduate school I went where I was exposed to more new things in the world than I could imagine but where I had to start making limiting choices. I had to choose the classes I wished to focus on, the teachers I wished to work with, the material I thought was interesting with the ultimate choice of writing a dissertation and orally defending the choices I made. We bolstered our own opinions about art by rejecting other people’s ideas. We were there to develop our own ideas. The problem was we were still all young and impressionable but were beginning to think we knew it all. We were developing our own taste.

Then it was off into the real world after graduating where I had my first exhibition at Northwestern Michigan Collage of a series of drawings I was doing at the time .  I thought I was radical in my desire to hang these drawings  unframed in the exhibition area, which was basically the hallway in the art building. The response from some of the art students was  to draw on my drawings and write on them how much the thought they were crap. I was even chastised by the administration for leaving myself open to such a reaction by not ‘properly framing” my work. They were expressing there personal taste.

Taste is ones opinion. There can be good opinions or bad opinions. The opinions about art I learned as a young student seem subordinate to the ‘aesthetics’ that Porter talks about. Porter’s idea of aesthetics implies a philosophy, a tool by which you sense things. A procedure by which you look. How you look and how you think about what your seeing is going to control what kind of taste you end up having.

It was the philosopher David Hume who believed that aesthetic judgment had to have both the ability to detect things with your sight and a emotional sensitivity to what you detect. You have to look first and be able to feel something about what your looking at. And it was Immanuel Kant who believed that  to aesthetically judge something depended on ones ability to be reflective on what you are seeing. All three of those qualities; sensations, emotions and intellect vary between people and are decisive factors how people decide what they like and don’t like in art. If you accept the notion that beauty is in the mind of the beholder then you also have to be willing to agree that not all of those minds may be firing on the same number of cylinders. The ability to see things varies from person to person. 

Fortunately there is a quality of being that isn’t solely dependent on how much you know. That quality is openness. Remaining open to the possibilities of art is what I believe Porter is referring to when he says that aesthetics “ implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.” You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to be interested in anything you don’t care to be interested in but you don’t get to automatically judge it as bad either. Aesthetics allows you to look, to inquire, to investigate. If you are going to be aesthetic about something it requires you to be respectful. If you  are going to make  judgments right away based on what you say your taste in art is you arr going to miss the whole experience. Here is a little test to use next time you are looking at something you may not understand – If It is easier to simply say you don’t like it than it is to explain why you don’t like it, you are probably not being aesthetic.

There is immense pleasure in going to a museum or an art gallery and simply looking.  Looking with the idea of beauty in your mind. There is a great sense of freedom to look and not be required to make a judgment. No one is going to give you a test. You don’t need to leave an opinion before you go out the door. You can form that later if you want. But the aesthetic experience can only begin if you are open enough to look.  And the joy of the aesthetic experience continues when you can later contemplate and think about what you have looked at and compare and contrast that with all the other things seen in the past.  Soon you have a history of looking and thinking about what you have seen. Possibly you will want to read about the artists and what they were thinking. You’ll want to read art history, buy art books, travel to cities just to see a exhibition. Its addictive. Its pleasurable. And if  you do so aesthetically you won’t have to fight with yourself so much anymore.

Taking The Time To See

 

Taking the Time to See

 

The first landscape painting class I ever took was from artist Melanie Parke, who three years later was to become my wife. She taught me how to see as a painter would. My first class with her met at the Nature Conservancy Preserve, part of the Point Betsie area, of Benzie County, Michigan. She pulled up in this beat up little pick up truck with the back end full of canvases, easels, paints, art books and a big dog. It was all so mysterious and I became hooked both on painting and her from the moment she opened a tube of paint.

  Even though I had receive a MFA from Ohio State University, I had never painted with oils or even painted a landscape before I took Melanie’s class. During the 80’s when I went to graduate school landscape painting was  thought of as passé.

  In her class Melanie would often say things like “Do you see the purple in that tree trunk?” or “That water needs more of this kind of green in it”. Purple tree trunks and green water?  What was this woman talking about?  It wasn’t until years later, after many bad paintings on my part that I began to understand more of what she was in fact trying to teach me.

Everyday we assume so much in our lives based on what we think we already know.  We generalize that the tree trunk is brown. Or at least that was the color taught to me when I was a kid in grade school. You picked the brown crayon and made a tree trunk just the way the teacher showed you. That fact became filed in my brain where it sat there waiting for the next time I needed to think about what color a tree trunk was. But when you really look at a tree trunk it can be composed of a myriad of colors, including purple. We assume things because it is easier and faster than  taking the time to really see something.  Seeing is different than looking to a painter. Seeing means taking the time to know something. Georgia O’Keeffe often said that if she painted The Pedernale, a prominent peak  she viewed from her home in New Mexico, enough times that God would give it to her. I think what she meant was that she painted it so often she began to know the mountain. It was hers.  She knew every curve of its profile, every section that dipped down or where the shadows lay. When you become familiar enough with something it begins to ground you and gives you a sense of place. You begin to be able to tell where you are in the world in relationship to those details. And the beauty of place becomes a compass for you.

One of the many great things about painting the landscape is that it gives you reason to visit beautiful parts of the country. Many prime spots are within our National Parks. Two of the great ones I have been to are Acadia National Park in Mount Desert Island Maine and, closer to my home, Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. Acadia National Park is a large populated island with a major road that circles it. Like the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore the park moves in an out among several small quaint villages and towns and fishing ports.

  The first time I painted in Acadia we had driven a long way, to arrived late with the sun maybe a couple hours from going down. Its a sweet time of the day to paint, the land laden with dark shadows and a golden sun. It can be very dramatic. “Lots of drama”, we say to each other as were setting up our equipment. But you have to act quickly because everything is changing so fast. A sliver of a shadow  in a matter of 15 minutes can suddenly become half of the view you are looking at. That bright sun casting a naples yellow mix soon changes to orange before your eyes.

When we arrived at Acadia National Park, Melanie and I were eager to get painting and found an incredible  shoreline view conveniently across the road from a parking area. We  quickly loaded up our backpacks with painting equipment, brushes, rags and grabbed our easels. In my haste I  started to cross the road and was  pushed back by the woosh of a rapidly moving tour bus. I quickly learned that Mount Desert Island and car traffic go hand in hand. Acadia gets over 2 million visitor a year, mostly by car. 

The Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive in the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore is another busy place where I love to paint. It has several  expansive vistas all connected by a circular drive. Many times I’ve been painting at a particular pull off point and seen someone get out of a car, snap a photo, and get back in to drive off. I question whether that little 4×6 photograph  is going to be able to convey any of the feeling of expansiveness, temperature, wind or smell of what they were looking at.

Landscape Painting isn’t photography.  Landscape Painting isn’t about capturing a scene.  Landscape Painting is about expressing the poetry of place. Its is as much about the paint quality, as the motif being used for a subject. To make a painting that tries to be the place, that tries to be like a photograph, borders on a type of illustration.  The painter Gregory Amenoff says that  illustration “by its nature is reassuring and contained” and isn’t art because  “it doesn’t extend consciousness beyond a fixed expectation”. I don’t quote Amenoff here to bash Illustration but rather to expand the idea of what art can do for us. To understand art is to comprehend the difference between the words ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. Denotation is the literal meaning of a word. Connotation is the idea or feeling a word invokes. Connotation like art is more akin to poetry than prose. Both poetry and prose involve taking the time to look but poetry asks that you take the time to really see.

Richard Kooyman 2008

A Subconscious Place

 

 

A  Subconscious Place

 

A  landscape painters overriding task is to stand  in the expansive three dimensional world and, somehow poetically, condense its visual information down onto a flat two dimensional piece of canvas. I don’t like the overly used term ‘Plein air’ painter when it comes to describing the outdoor painting process.  In the first place I’m not French. I  don’t use the French words for paints or brushes so why call myself a  plein air painter. Secondly, the title designates  a feigned specialty to the fact that it was painted outdoors.  I love to paint outdoors. It’s both fun and significant. But it is equally important to freely take the work back indoors, where it will eventually  live, to work on it more if need be. And more often than not it needs more work. Painting is a process that involves action and retrospection. Usually I  won’t see all that the painting needs until some time has gone by.  The fact that a painting was made  ‘plein air’ is not  what is most important. 

When it comes to painting outdoors what seems of greater significance  is ones biophilia. The word biophilia literally means ‘ love of life or living systems’. The writer Edward O. Wilson used  the term to describe  ‘the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life’.    As a painter I have to make connections with what I want to paint. I must  come to understand  the  different shapes of  trees, the  different colors of sand on the beach.  And sometimes that connection is a subconscious one. When I paint outdoors  I take all my painting equipment out into the field, set up in an intriguing spot, study it, try to get the feel of what I’m looking at. I’m thinking about paintings I have done before in similar situations. I need to make conscious decisions about what color palette I might want to use or have used in the past.  Or recall what other artists work I find interesting and how they  might have tackled certain issues. After all of that calculated thinking, the most important thing I need to do is to try to forget most of the stuff  which I just described.  Good painting, I once read, is about having one foot in the present and one foot in the subconscious. I’m trying to create, not replicate, something on the canvas. As the artist Paul Klee said ‘Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible’. I’m striving  to be physically in the present, in the place I’m painting, and at the same time  represent the  emotional experience of being in that place.  The temperature, the feeling of the wind, the smell of the air, all expressed through the use of paint.  But that involves much more than just trying to making it look real.  I’m aiming for connotation rather than denotation; more akin to poetry than prose. Georgia O’Keeffe believed that in art  “There is nothing less real than realism”. In other words the best photorealistic painter in the world is not going to be able to recreate the experience of being in a place.  Better to acknowledge the simple fact that you are making a painting of a place and focus on the beauty of the paint; how thick the paint is applied, does it have a shine or is it flat, do the colors meld together to create surprising results, are the strokes bold and confident. There is wonder in these considerations. 

I live in Northwestern Michigan close to the 45th parallel. I was raised in Michigan born to parents who immigrated here from Holland after World War II. They didn’t have any particular connection to the land or the environment of this area. They just ended up here. Yet in my life I already feel a  subconscious connection to this area of land.

 One cause for those biophilic or topophilic connections to place  is the quality of light one becomes accustom to.  The amount and type of light a place has  can impact your sense of place. This is  especially true being a painter. Artists paint light or the refracted color of light. Northern Michigan has a certain light quality both in its sunshine and its over cast skies.  Michigan, especially along the lake shore where it tends to be more cloudy, is not for the faint of heart. One has to be able to find  the special beauty in the light of a cloudy day  for the simple reason that the cloudy days far out number the sunny ones. Interestingly, if you follow the 45th parallel around the world our light environment here in the Grand Traverse area lines up with the likes of Bordeaux France, Venice Italy and Nova Scotia. All of those regions historically have been a draw to many great artists.

One of my biophilic favorite  locations to paint is the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore. The zenith of locations within the park( its hard to choose) is being atop Sleeping Bear Point. Sleeping  Bear Point is a large mini peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan. Flanked on the north and the west by Lake Michigan and to the east by Sleeping Bear Bay.  You can understand the point best from two vantage positions. One is walking along the lake shore from the National Park Maritime Museum west to the actual point. Here you are walking along the shore of a protect bay, Sleeping Bear  Bay,  large enough to provide a safe harbor for long freighters in strong gales. As you continue along the shore of the bay you round the point and then come long the shore of the big lake.  Standing at the shoreline of the point you often see waves approaching you  from two separate directions, an awe inspiring phenomenon. Its here where you can feel you are at the head of a large land mass. It looms behind you and spills you out into the lake.  North, South, and Fox Islands in the distance, seem deceptively close enough at times that  you could  swim to them. 

  The last couple of years the waters of Lake Michigan  have run right into a steep bluff off the western edge of the point. There is little beach to walk along here and one must dip into the lake to proceed along the beach to where you come to a long blow out that leads you up onto  the top of the bluff. This second vantage is atop of the point itself. The feeling is that of being on a large bow of a ship as it heads to the islands. A broad open area filled mostly with beach grass and a small grouping of trees. 

The challenge for anything to grow on top of the point is to be able to hang onto the soil long enough. Anything  large that catches too much wind or too small that it’s roots can’t hold  the sandy soil won’t survive. Temperature is what ultimately defines this area .  I sense surrounding me when painting in the National Lakeshore that the lands characteristics are defined by the cold. A cold intense enough that in the winter one could  easily freeze to death. To walk up onto the point in the gale of a winter storm is to have ones breath literally taken away. Its one of my favorite things to do in winter.

  The effects of the cold  can be seen on the flora and animals that inhabit the area. Trees and bushes that lose there footing, their grip to the soil, are blown over and dry up in the summer heat. Creatures that cannot burrow deep in the ground for protection and forage enough in the fall to last the months of winter can not inhabit this land. On a warm spring or summer day  the point is idillic but the added thrill I sense is that you can only visit here for a short time. The Point will push you off  when it is time to leave.

Visiting  Sleeping Bear Point in the winter is one of the most beautiful sights I know. I also don’t see any plein air painters up there.