John Marin

John Marin 1870-1953 is recognized as the greatest American Modernist Artist. He is known for his abstracted landscapes and watercolors which seemed so far ahead of his time when they were painted. I love what he has to say about the artists process.

 

“You cannot create a work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you”

“Using paint as paint is different from using paint to paint a picture”

“A work of art tells the story the best, it transcends the factual”

“Just put down a color that 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”

“Some of the etchings I had been making before Stieglitz showed my work already had some freedom about them. I had already begun to let go some. After he began to show my work, I let go a lot more of course. But in the watercolors I had been making even before Stieglitz first saw my work, I had already begun to let go in complete freedom.”

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

Dogs and the Color Wheel

This winter my wife Melanie and I  needed to learn as much as we could about dog behavior. One of the things we did was to watch every episode of the National Geographic Channel’s ‘Dog Whisperer’ with renowned dog behaviorist Cesar Millan. Cesars view on dog behavior involves the principle that dogs are animals that communicate first with there noses, then their eyes then there ears.  We as owners run into problems because we think they react first with their ears, then their eyes, then their noses. The  ‘Dog Whisperer’ episodes are as much a psychological study of people than of their dogs. Maybe more so. Cesar believes that when it comes to dogs, what we feel is more important than what we think. I think many of his beliefs about psychological energy forming our lives can be applied to teaching painting. 

There are volumes of books  on how to paint. Most of them tend to be technically oriented and organized around chapters on color, tone, values, and form.  What every one of these books usually touch upon is what is called the ‘color wheel’. If you Google the words ‘color wheel’ the  search results in 2,120,000 varying images and 7,480,000 web site results.  One internet art supply company sells 15 different types of charts, wheels and grids to assist an artist in understanding and mixing colors. If your patient enough you can study color theory, color models, subtractive color mixing(light absorbing) or additive color mixing( light reflecting) along with RGB color systems and the CMYK color gamut.  I can see the need  to organize all these colors. I can also understand the importance  for industry to have a uniform system of color selection. But I don’t think much of it really applies to being a painter . Not in the big picture of things.

Amazon and most public libraries are filled with art instructional books, all devising their own system for mixing colors and setting up color palettes for the artist. The authors of these systematic books believe that their description of  principles of color theory will  help readers to understand the basics and start them down the wonderful road of being an artist. I’m not sure any of them actually do that. I think that because the books are a rational organizing of principles.   Understand the principles and you understand the rational. Understand the rational and you can paint. And in one sense they are helpful because artists need tools and you need to understand how to use a tool to be able to do something with it. But like Cesars ideas about how dogs experience the world we don’t experience art rationally. We look at art rationally. We experience art emotionally and poetically. Artists have to take their technical knowledge and do something poetic with it. And I think you put the cart before the horse when you stress technique before poetry; not to mention that you end up teaching people to be artists that see the world and paint like their teacher. The world doesn’t need another artist that paints like me. The world needs an artist that paints like you.

  Cesar’s clients are often shocked when he comes to their house  and is asked  to fix their dogs problems and he immediately tells them (often without even seeing the dog in action) that the problem isn’t with the dog, its with the owner. But by the end of the program the owners are elated with the their new found ability to see what the dog really needs and what they can do to meet those needs. Most painting students, with  just a push in the right direction, can start to figure out by themselves how to mix a color simply by comparison. And most new artists become equally elated to realize what is important is not the technical aspects of painting but paintings poetry.

 

Richard Kooyman

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.”  

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

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  

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.

 

 

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.