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.

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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Morandi at the Met

       On the train coming back into the city from the Dia Museum in Beacon I overheard a woman tell her seat mate, “Everything is going every which way”.  That seemed  a perfect summation of New York City.  F Train UpTown  to Manhattan/Queens transfers to the A, C,  4, & 5 Train. ‘Watch the closing doors please’. Downtown 6 train stops only on the weekdays. East bound L train to Williamsburg – West bound back into the city.  Everyone…everything… is going every which way. People coming down stairs and going up elevators; delivering, buying, selling, doing things respectable and unmentionable. Grand dames in long fur coats of every color and naked men relieving themselves in parks.  Polished granite buildings and store fronts tended by doormen and facades of glued bill postings and graffiti paint with doors that haven’t been opened in years. Smells of french brioches, steam vents, noodle shops and urine. A continuous exhale of steam and sounds.  New building and  old structures on streets both random and patterned. Restaurants that prep, cook, and wash dishes in spaces no larger than my closet. Trees, trash, trains, topiaries, gold, silver, brass, chrome, and beautiful women from around the world. Fourteen dollar glasses of wine and ninety nine cent pieces of pizza. Sushi and  pork shanks, italian sausages and french pastries. You only need to decide when and and how much you want. 

 Everything is going every which way and then you step into the institutions that for years have collected, cataloged, cared for and exhibited the greatest art works from around the world. You step in and things feel different.  You feel the presence of the art.  One of New York’s largest art institutions is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Visiting it one first needs to accept that it is impossible to see everything you might want to see in one visit. Even if you limit it to just paintings, one should not try to see it all. Best to pick some of your favorites and spend time with them. Visit them like you would a wise sage or mentor.

 For most artists great museums are our churches. A place to regain spirit and to stand in awe of something. The sculptor Michael Heizer states that, “Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience”.  A sense of awe certainly is felt in front of Claude Monet’s mural sized painting, “Reflections of Clouds on the Water Lily Pond”, (1920). Painted late in Monet’s life when he was 80 years old its as modern and energetic as Joan Mitchell’s paintings being shown at Cheim & Read in Chelsea. Monet painted ‘Reflections’  some 60 years before Mitchell’s  energetic work and both seem to be singing the same hymn in the same church.   Even harder to comprehend historically is J.M.W. Turners “The Whale Ship”. Painted in 1845 a full 75 years before Monet’s painting, “The Whale Ship” is a gnarly mass of paint marks, glazed exaggerated shapes and the blackest coal black I have every felt on a painting. It presence almost makes Monet’s painting seem conservative.

One of the largest in effect yet smallest in size paintings in the Met is Picasso’s  “Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). The finished larger work is Picassos’s most famous and seminal work but on the same wall is this little simple study, one of  hundreds he made in preparation for the famous work. Its as large as the big one.

Like a fish swimming up stream I was drawn in themes and interest to Cezanne’s “The Bather”(1883) and then to Matisse’s famous “The Red Studio”(1911) before being pulled to the modern rooms to stand before Philip Guston’s beautifully monstrous red in his “Stationary Figure”(1973) and “The Street”(1977).  I remember first seeing these paintings years ago and not knowing what to make of them because I wasn’t willing to be open to what they did. I just didn’t have the language.  Now I can hardly control myself from grabbing people as they casually pass by to say, “Ya but look at this”!  Almost directly across the room from the Gustons is Howard Hodgkin’s “When did we go to Morocco” and David Hockney’s “Large Interior” (1988) demanding their fair share of your attention. Two small Robert Ryman’s, typically all white, slam you aside before you want to jump back in time and space into the many wonderful Bonnard’s in the collection. I realized on this pilgrimage that Bonnard really just wanted to paint abstractly. He just could not let go of painting all those “things” he needed to paint with his colors and shapes. But beautiful ‘things’ they are.

Melanie and I spent several hours at the Giorgio Morandi Exhibition. This is a  painter’s painter exhibition that only comes around one is a great while. A monumental collection of the Italian painter who spent his life living with his sisters and painting his assortment of bottles and jars in his tiny studio. The paint seemed like ground italian earth (which I’m sure some of it was) blended to a rich butter creaminess. His body of work is a testament to an idea and a message to all artists that a simple idea can be explored for a life time. They beckon you as a painter and one can almost hear Giorgio say to you “See this is how I did it” as you look at his culmination of paintings.

And then its almost to much. You reach a saturation point. Too much beauty, too much inspiration. You have to retreat back outside onto the streets. Buts its not really a retreat. Its just more things moving, pulling you every which way. Excitement at what one both expects to happen and the joyous experience of the unexpected.

Letter to Students

 

What makes a good  landscape painting?  What are we trying to do out here in the sun and the wind?  What is it we are trying to capture with paint?  What makes a painting beautiful?  These questions and more define the landscape painters quest. Hans Hoffman in one of his famous classes summarized the problem by saying, “The artists technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit”  The most interesting word in that statement is ‘transform’.  The focus being on transformation.  What Hoffman is talking about here is poetry – visual poetry. Technique is only the important first half of  the picture.   Frederick Von Schelling the 18th century philosopher said that art is made by two processes. “ Art is brought to completion by two thoroughly different activities…one part of art,namely, the part that is practiced with consciousness, deliberation ,and reflection, which can also be taught and learned..on the other hand, we must seek in the unconscious,which also enters into art,for that in art that cannot be learned, cannot be attained by practice or in any other way, but can only be inborn by the free gift of nature, and which is what we may call in one word the  poetry in art” 

So how does an artist combine these two processes?  After we have studied the masters and watch the way our peers tackle certain problems there comes a time where we have to add something of ourselves into the equation. We have to add our  own poetry to the mix. Easier  said than done in a world where poetry is hardly ever taught. That is not to say you just start slopping paint around hoping that it is being controlled by some inner poetic genie.  The American Painter Wolf Kahn early on in his career said “ ..accidental process are often superior to willed ones, but the framework in which one works is formal intentionality”.  We have to be intentional in what we do.  We have to use our experience and our technical knowledge but at the same time stay open to what is happening on the canvas that our conscious mind hasn’t intended. This is the door to the poetic. Think of it as a part of your subconsciousness. That little voice that so often gets shoved aside.  Ask yourself often while  painting,”What mark is this brush I have in my hand making?”  Is there  something great happening on the painting surface that you hadn’t planned on?  This is why I love using brushes that really seem bigger than they should be for the job. You just never know what it is going to do. It makes you not expect everything you are doing. The act of painting is a relationship, a dance between what you are thinking that you’d like to see happen and what does happen. Be direct in your intentions but leave the window open to the unexpected. The unexpected is also what makes oil paining so wonderfully special. Oil paint  can stain a canvas. It leaves tracks where the artists has been and what he/she has changed and gone over with a new idea or passage. Oil paint drips, smudges, runs ,bleeds into the color next to it on the surface. It can be gone over with a heavier thicker coat of a different color or  veiled with a wash of transparency. It lends itself to the unexpected. It can be a tool to the poetic.

Take the time to look at what is happening. Step back often from the canvas. Walk around it. Look at it from the side angles. Squint at it. Look away from the canvas and then sneak a quick look at it as you walk by it. This way you see things differently or what you might have missed when you are standing right in front of the canvas.  The obvious is sometimes the most obscured.  When you do see what you need to do, do it with conviction and great intention. Take that brush full of paint and make that mark.  Make it like you mean it. And if its wrong don’t be afraid to change it. I can’t tell you how many times I have spent hours diddling around trying to carefully fix a little part of a problem on the canvas when in my heart I knew what I should do is grab a big rag, wipe it off  and start over. Better to start fresh and build on what you now know what not to do. 

Don’t put off the hard parts till later. If possible do them first. The  painter Fairfield Porter said, “I made the mistake of thinking that I could do everything later instead of at the beginning.” Each painting is a record of a moment, a time and a place. What and how you do something is recorded on the canvas for that moment of time.

Don’t get buried in the details. Try not to get too caught up in  all the descriptive incidentals of the scene. You don’t need to paint every leaf of the tree. we tend not to even see them in real life anyway. Instead focus on the shape of the tree.  Its better to be suggestive than too descriptive. Its more poetic to be connotative(suggestive) than denotative(specific).

No one can really teach you how to paint.  They can teach you how they paint but whats the point in that?  We can talk about art, the reason for making it, the different styles of art and how others make art, but each person contains their own seed for making original wonderful art. Its that seed you really want to work at.  The ways may be individually many and seem confusing in scope at times  but there are great possibilities. I think it was the writer Jim Harrison who said that “Life is short but wide”. 

So how does one become a good painter?  The million dollar question. I think it takes two simple things. The first is that  you have to align yourself with what good painting is really about. Its not about making decoration. Its not about recording what is in front of you like a camera would record it. Painting is an act, like in”action”. The result of your action,(what color went first, which big or small sized tools did you use, what did you leave out, what did you put in) is the painting. If your action is hesitant,fearful, confused, you are going to produce a painting that has those qualities. If you paint willfully and boldly you going to produce that type of paintings.

I’m not saying you should paint like me.  All of the painters I mention above are very different in STYLE of painting but they all share what it is that makes a good painting.

The second thing you have to do is paint. It’s as simple as that. You have to make a place for your work ,a studio or extra room, where you can treat painting seriously and then…paint. Look at painters,  buy books, go to exhibitions, museums, immerse yourself in the art world. Its an educational quest just like learning a new language. You are learning the language of paint. You have to invest your time to learn anything in the world. Painting is no different. And if you do invest the time, create a space for your art in your life not only can it be rewarding it can be your livelihood. It can be your life.

Richard Kooyman 2007

Painting and Bach

Painting and Bach 

 

When  painting in the studio I have always  listened to music. For me, the essentials  for a working studio environment are: good lighting, lots of wall space and a sound system to play music on.  Not every artist wants  to listen to music while they work. One painter I know wants to hear the repeated sound of his brush as it scrapes against the canvas. It  helps reminds him that painting  is an both an action and reaction between the painters ideas and the paint. I like solitude in the studio at times but more often than not I want the effect music has on me while I’m painting.  Playing good music while I work is more than just background entertainment;  it seems directly connected to my painting process.  Music is, as the Greeks defined it, a muse. I welcome the Greek Goddesses of  the arts, music, poetry, dance.  I’ll summoned the help anywhere I can.   

Moments of inspiration, the sound of the muse, can happen in a particular piece of music or just one phrase of a song.  The muse I want to hear when I am painting  is a spark, an aesthetic epiphany of sorts.  The ah-ha moment where things seem clear and boundless at the same time. It becomes the moment when you in a sense step out of your own way, side stepping your immediate plans or ideas to allow something else to happen; something better than you might have ever planned to do on your own. This is, maybe stated in overly simple terms, the creative moment. And sometimes music can initiate that moment.

For a long time  the collection of things I would play in my studio seemed quite eclectic. The jazz riffs of John Coltrane, a British band called Elbow, the African rhythms of Ali Farka Toure, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel singing and spoken word pieces by Charles Mingus. On one hand all these styles seemed  disassociated from each other  but they  also seemed  in a  way related. There were some pieces I played once in a while when I might need a particular lift and then there were whole compact discs or portions of  discs that I played over and over while painting. They all did something that I liked, something that inspired, but it wasn’t until I fell in love with the music of J.S.Bach that I  thought I might understand how they inspired.

Bach wrote most of his music in the contrapuntal style of the time. Contrapuntal music is written with two or more independent voices that interweave together building upon each other. He took  these voices and note structures and  wrote, in his lifetime, over 1200 completed works.  As an artist what intrigues me about Bach  was that he wrote  all  his music for one particular purpose. He wrote  so the people who played the work, or sang the pieces, or listened to them felt the presence of God. He believed that the work itself could have that effect. This was a  faithful notion that even by the end of his life was becoming old fashioned. Music was to become more harmonic and purely entertaining in the coming Age of Enlightenment. But I can still feel a sense of his purpose in the music he wrote.  Bach joins a long lineage of musicians that seem to be driven by intentions. They  want to affect people in a particular way.  Native people played rhythms on drums, Bach wrote fugues, Whirling Dervishes spun in circles, and  Jimmie Hendrix played his guitar. The vehicle by which you can feel this musical pulse, can be diverse and  varied.  Most people know ‘it’ when they hear it, or more precisely, when they feel it. 

  James Joyce defined good art as that which turns your ‘attention outward’ from yourself.  Good music does the same, drawing your focus to something larger than you. That is what Bach was doing. I’m not suggesting  we follow Bachs religious beliefs. I’m suggesting  we listen to  his larger picture, his muse.  And when one can listen to the larger picture, new ideas and new ways of approaching a painting can happen. I want that to take place when I’m painting.

I came to love Bach, as may have through the  piano playing of Glenn Gould.  Gould, the musician and the man, seemed to embodied everything that I find exciting in the arts.  A fresh outlook with a nod to the past, a life dedicated to the purpose of art, and complete originality. For me it was Glenn Gould, who played Bach like no one before him, that open the door to classical music and what Bach was trying to do.   Gould took all his influences and upbringing, and created something completely unique with his interpretation. The piano playing of Glenn Gould took the world be storm precisely because so many could feel what he was doing was special.  Gould was the first Canadian pianist to play a concert tour in Russia. He was 24 years old. The  first  recital on the tour was  performed in St. Petersburg  and was more than half empty. Partly because people in the Soviet Union at that time just didn’t listen to Bach. It was hardly ever played. At the intermission people in attendance ran to call friends and relatives to drop what ever they were doing and to come down to join them because something very special was happening. By the time the second half  of the concert commenced people were lined up on the streets pressing to get in. They were pressing in to hear Glen Gould play  Bach. They  were pressing in to hear the creative sound of the Muse.

Painting like performing music, is an action. It is a process, an event. A painter takes a whole bunch of parts,  works them together in some type of alchemy and  hopefully creates something of beauty. Those parts consist of ideas, influences, historical references,  paints and painting tools. All these things need to come together and fit correctly. There are a plethora of combinations in the way these aspects can fit together, which account for different styles and tastes in art. But even with all these different approaches each painting needs to be constructed so that it works. The parts need to fit, to be whole, just as Bachs contrapuntal voices needed to fit. As a painter to see or hear another artist put their distinctive ideas together beautifully is inspirational. It fuels oneself. It is the beatific image of the creative Muse herself. 

 

Richard Kooyman

January 2008

What Turner Painted

Ian Warrell, a Tate Museum curator and authoritive on the works of J.M.W. Turner wrote this about the great painter. I really want to think more alike to this when I’m painting. Its good stuff.” Turner refashioned it’s (Venice) topography in his imagination, painting it in his unique way, so that it is sometimes almost unrecognizable. His is a disorienting vision of the city lurking within the actual place. Try to locate these images in Venice and you will find only stone and water. For what Turner created here was a profound fusion of reality with a deeply personal response and in this lies his achievement.”  

Getting Started

One of the hardest things for students to contemplate, and even for myself sometimes, is how to start working. To begin something it often seems we need a reason. But if art is poetry, reasoning isn’t always your friend. Here are some  great quotes I carry with me when I need to think about ‘begining’. 

” I don’t know what you do when you start but I clean my desk. I make a lot of stupid appointments that I make sound important. Avoidance, delay, denial. I’m always scared that I’m not going to know what to do. It’s a terrifying moment. And then when I start I’m always amazed… ‘Oh that wasn’t so bad’.”    Frank Gehry 

 ” I have emptied myself of knowledge of facts. Facts have the habit of being proven wrong”    Agnes Martin 

“The reason for reasons is always changing”  Louis Menard 

  ”What counts here….first and last… is not so called knowledge of so called facts, but vision….seeing. What counts is not the what but the how.”  Joseph Albers

 ” If you really want to hurt your parents and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly is a way  to make your soul grow for heavens sake.”  Kurt Vonnegut

 ” Just put down a color the paper will like, a color that looks alright in itself. If the paper likes it, it doesn’t matter if it’s not a transcript from nature.”  John Marin  

Writing About Art

Over the years I have been keeping journals (erratically) and attempting to write down my thoughts about art and being an artist. I’ve always enjoyed reading what other artists that I admired have had to say and  collecting those quotes. This last year I have been formally writing some essays about my experiences and want to use this blog as a place to publish some of these themes. I hope that other artists, patrons and those who take my classes will find something of inspiration and value in these words.