Aesthetics

 

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

Fairfield Porter 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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