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.

A new Fall

    Lets start again. From the beginning again with more emphasis. More complete with purpose. Better “throw’ as the painter Sam Scott says.

    A  painters work is cyclic like the seasons. I start a painting, work on it and eventually finish it to start something new again.  A new canvas, new beginning, new ideas.

   The geese are honking as they fly above my studio, headed to warmer southern climates. This really signals the coming of winter. The end of the busy summer season and the start of the short days of winter. Its November and there is the weight of snow in the air.  It has always been my favorite time of the year. As a boy I loved these dark days, the crispness of the outdoor air contrasted with the warmth and smells of indoor cooking. Now I like it for those same reasons but its also the time of year when the distractions of gardening and other outdoor activities has ended and the focus is on my studio. I was born in the fall and every fall I feel like I want to start  over.  Its not that what I did previously is wrong but its not where I want it to be.  I am coming to understand these thoughts more and more and now even welcome them. I realize that its the thread shared with all artists who have come before me. That longing for more, bigger, better.

   I have become more  of a studio painter over the last years. I’ve learned there is no automatic magic just because a landscape is painted outside.  I can’t call anything that I’m working on in the studio now completely new because the work is always a continuation, whether you realize it or not. Nothing  then is really new its just the next step. I’ve found old canvas from several years back that miraculously seem to have the initial seed of  current work in them. The future never seems planned but the past always feels meant to be. Its always the next group of paintings I’m excited about. All artist  feel hopeful about the future. Its where our best work resides.

   Melanie Parke, my wife and partner, tells me that astrologically I’ve started a ‘building year’.  Its a year where I’m to learn from the past and  construct something from those lessons learned.  Given the unpredictability of  life I’ve come to believe that astrology is just as dependable as anything else. At least it has plenty of potential built into the system. 

   Painting is a type of construction. A building upon action and reaction using pigments and mediums. Its not really about what we are painting. Its about how we are painting it. The subject is just our rationale for painting.   I like to paint  because it is the one act I can do where I don’t get to know where I’m going.  That can be both terrifying and terribly exciting.  Similar to the act of traveling – if you have to stay on schedule your just not going to have a very good time.

So I’ve stored the completed paintings in the studio, turning them to face the wall so as not to be distracted by their presence. I’ve cleaned my desk of paper work and bills. I ‘m starting a New Years resolution and its only November. My resolution is to throw all the crap out of my life the minute I deem it to be.  I’ve swept the studio floor, buttoned up the windows against the cold and rearranged the layout of my painting tables. I stopped listening to the news months ago. I’m eagerly awaiting the day in February when, I have been told,  something sinister is suppose to happen to my television and I won’t be able to get my local channels.  I see it as Gods recent gift to mankind – not being able to watch any type of  television news coverage of which we are told we can count on.  I’m emptying my head of useless facts and making room for useful ones. The artist, Agnes Martin went a step further. She said she gave up on facts altogether because they couldn’t be trusted. (Maybe we should tax things that can’t be trusted? Who would complain?) 

   Grace Hartigan one of the second generation Abstract Expressionist painters died this week at the age of 86. She once told an interviewer, “I didn’t choose painting, it choose me. I didn’t have any talent. I had genius.”   I don’t think Hartigan was referring to genius as ability but rather another definition of the word meaning “the prevalent character or spirit of a nation or age”.  She was referring to her good fortune to be a part of  a new movement, a new age in art. The hopeful excitement of the new.

Richard Kooyman

November 2008

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

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.