So I have looked at lots and lots of studios. One that mystified me for a long time was Pierre Bonnard‘s studio at Le Cannet. It’s tiny. Adding to that, this tiny second story room has a four foot tall platform filling about three quarters of it. This room was Bonnard’s choice. It was his house, and he was a well known established artist when he moved in. So it wasn’t like there was this frustrating situation with his grandmother or something. Bonnard said that he really liked this studio.

 As you can tell, this mystified me for years. Then I was hired to curate several shows in galleries around town for the annual arts festival in Columbia, Maryland. I visited an artist, Effie Gereny, at her quite beautiful studio in Baltimore, that had been added to her house. The studio was big enough to spread around many of her large paintings to sort out the best work for the show. I had to go up several steps to leave, since the floor of the studio was lower than that of the house, and I paused on the platform before entering the house. As I looked down at the work I had been spending time with, I was able to have a fresh look with each piece, giving me new insights about the work and how to show it. I also now knew that this was what was happening with Bonnard, who liked his little studio with high vantage points.

The teacher who most transformed my life as an artist was my high school art teacher, Mary Murtha.  We started working together in my Junior year at the Institute of Notre Dame, in Baltimore.  The summer before, I suffered a massive nervous breakdown.  Lots of people use the term for crises of very different proportions.  I’m talking about a profound rupture;  I had memory problems and couldn’t do simple arithmetic for a year.  I was a seriously hurting, damaged person, and I needed special help that she freely gave.

In addition to ordinary classroom work, she took me to museums.  I learned about Morris Louis and the other painters in the Washington color school.  During my senior year she worked with me on an individual basis, she taught me to draw, and got me started with oil paint.  My first painting done on a stretched canvas was created in this context.  I have it hanging in my studio.

The senior class went on a trip to New York, and she was the adult taking charge of my small group of about eight students.  She was able to get us standing room tickets to the ballet, and we went to the Museum of Modern Art.  This was the first time any of us encountered one of Ad Reinhart’s black paintings.  We looked at the painting, and not knowing what to think, looked to Mrs. Murtha.  “It’s visual art, you sort it out by looking at it.”  We said that we did look at it.  “Not long enough,” was her answer.  We stood and stared, and were filled with wonder at the experience.  It was absolutely the best way to be introduced to Ad Reinhart’s work.  I also learned from this how to deal with art that is unfamiliar or confusing.  It was our good luck to go to MOMA when they had an installation by Robert Irwin.  She got us excited about the possibilities that art can explore beyond the ordinary boundaries.

Mary Murtha was just starting out as an art teacher when I met her, and she didn’t teach art for long after I graduated.  At one point I saw her when she was working on a doctorate in American literature.  She was writing her thesis on Hawthorne.  She died of cancer a few years after that.  I can’t believe my good luck in having the relationship with her that I did.  She knew that I would be a professional artist, and she gave me much that I would need.

If you would like to take me up on my suggestion to look at Kathe Kollwitz’s work, here are a few sites to get started:

http://www.a-r-t.com/kollwitz/images/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4the_Kollwitz

Like all artists, I need to devote time and attention to the business of exhibiting and promoting my work. Now that I live in Florida, this means that I am getting myself established professionally in this part of the country. So while I am fortunate in many ways as an artist, and have been able to devote much more time to my art than is the case for many other artists, freedom from the pressures that limit studio time is not part of my life.

I have discovered that it is important to have one part of the day for painting, and I let that be the anchor for my schedule. If I can get this part of my life working right, then I can get a lot of the rest of it to fall in line. My painting time runs from 9 to 10 pm to 1 am. This is the time of the day when I have the most energy, and it is also a time when there are no interruptions.

 There are times when I break the pattern. From time to time something just needs attention, and I must give it. I have also begun using Saturday nights for writing. Those are exceptions that prove the rule at this point. It has taken years and years to establish this pattern, and I hope to keep it going for a long time, because it provides me with pacing that works.

I have found that artists generally have to fight for the freedom to work, and time constraints are particular difficulties. While the problem can take many forms, it ca be nice to know that the problem is shared. It seems to me that the goal is to set a disciplined pattern, and it’s important to be willing to fight this as a permanent part of one’s life.

An item currently in the news was that the parents of a teen-ager were suing a rock band because they felt that the band’s music pushed their son toward committing suicide. I found that my own experience with IOU gave me a new vantage point when looking at the unforeseen consequences of the public use of meaningful content in one’s work.

As I write this I worry about the fate of all of those dealing with the tragic shooting in Arizona, where a congresswoman, and several others fight for their lives, and a judge, a little girl, and other fine people have died. Some are arguing that the gunman in Arizona is like the person who looked at my painting and thought it said “I hate you.” It may be true that the gunman needed no help to get to his own very dark place. That doesn’t mean that words have no effect, or that we are absolved of all responsibility when we run our mouths in a hateful way.

We have all been watching as raging political debate at times has been lapsing into hate speech. For this to turn into violence should surprise no one, and common sense tells us that radical demonization of the other side coupled with martial and gun oriented metaphors is not the responsible thing to do. I am a liberal Democrat, and it would be easy for me to point fingers here. That would be wrong. Even though I have been worrying that an incident like this was coming, it could be that many people, who we may think should know better, actually didn’t know better.

It is important that we recognize that some who were using gun related incendiary political rhetoric had no idea that such imagery can be planting a dark message in the minds of a few. Some of them might not even care, but others may be learning a hard lesson in a very hard way. It is important that we nurture change here, and create an environment where a change in political discourse is not trumpeted as a political capitulation. In other words, we need to create a safe environment for change.

When I was in high school, Mary Murtha, my quite spectacular art teacher, invited one of her friends to talk to us about her paintings. I regret the fact that I don’t remember this artist‘s name because she really made a difference for me in her talk. It was my first chance to see how an artist’s work develops over time.

She did more than that, she shared with us her correspondence over many years with Pierre Bonnard. At the beginning she asked the class if we knew who Bonnard was, and when no hands went up, she managed to impress us with his accomplishments, even though she didn’t have images of his paintings to show us.

The letters covered the really practical details involving the life of an artist. It was what every artist who struggles with life and work, and wants to keep those two from killing each other, needs to hear. She would send letters full of stress about: Kids! Housework! Laundry! Time! Exhaustion! Bonnard would answer with pages of gentile encouragement. He liked goal-setting, and suggested that she try to find a way to work at her art for 2 hours a month. She accepted that goal, and told us that for some years it was really difficult to be faithful to that goal. She was faithful, though, and she had the paintings and the growth in those paintings to show for it.

A two hour a month goal certainly seems like too little to build a body of work, but it did work for her. I’ve read that JRR Tolkien had one hour a day for his writing for most of his career. Sometimes we need to challenge ourselves by setting goals that will make us reach, but that’s not appropriate in every case. Sometimes we need to be gentile with ourselves, and set the goal that we really know we can reach. After all, it isn’t setting the goal that’s the big deal; it’s reaching it.

Many of us have copied paintings of celebrated artists to learn about their vision and technique. Gorky took it a step further. When he wanted to study, say, Cezanne, he wanted to really get into Cezanne’s head. So he would go out and find dishes, tablecloth, and fruit, and set up a still life that looked like Cezanne’s still lifes. Then he would “be” Cezanne, and paint the still life in his style.

Every now and then you will run across one of Gorky’s studies from this period. They can be disconcerting at first. You see this Cezanne, but it clearly isn’t Cezanne. Part of your brain shouts “Who is this?” Then you look at the label and find that this is a Gorky.

It is painful to take in the suffering this man endured, yet it is also a marvel to see how much of it he endured gracefully. When his studio burned and much of his work was destroyed in the fire, he called it a chance for a fresh start, an opportunity to create a new body of work unencumbered by what came before. A nice thought, but Gorky opened doors for painting in ways that seemed quite free of encumbrances, while he was also able to use the tools his study of previous artists gave him. I see in his attitude and achievements a good model for a new year.

Learn more about Gorky at:  http://arshilegorkyfoundation.org/

When giving honorary doctorates, MICA often included people in the art world that were often overlooked by other institutions. They gave a doctorate to Raphael Soyer, and all of us did what we could to show that he was our favorite candidate. We clapped, we stomped our feet, we cheered, because we wanted him to know that we appreciated his efforts throughout his long career, much of it carried out in obscurity.

We knew that we faced a difficult future as artists. We understood that the decision to become a professional fine artist meant for most of us a lifetime of financial sacrifice, and a career spent as an unknown. We also knew that Raphael Soyer was an artist who faced these difficulties and remained true to his art. His vision of life was shaped by the nature of his gift, and he had no real choice but to develop his art naturally. He worked in the shadow of the abstract expressionists, the hot new work that was zealously promoted throughout the art world. Abstraction was new, and brash claims that the future of painting was in abstraction alone was a claim for territory from those determined to get abstraction to take hold of the culture.

The critics derided Soyer’s realism as the unfashionable art of yesterday. Soyer continued his work, and we who are not caught up in notions of progress that limited Soyer’s critics can see that one school of thought in art doesn’t plow under others the way computers have replaced typewriters. New visions of art develop along with older traditions. The new may influence contemporary manifestations of earlier imagery, but it doesn’t kill it. Today we can freely combine realism with abstraction in the same painting, confidently using each type of imagery to communicate meaning with the power that each provides. Soyer kept his art going when it was costly to be working in the way he did, and proved by the appeal of his work that his imagery would always be relevant to the human spirit. We were proud of our gratitude for his efforts and his art, and noisily did what we could to show it.

More information about the life and art of Raphael Soyer can be found at the Archives of American Art: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline/soyeraph/

Brothers, 1999, oil on canvas, 38" x 36"

Process has been a buzz word in art since the early days of modernism. Appropriately so, for this is a time when the process of building a work of art has been a characteristic focal point of much of the best work that’s been done in the past 100 years. The process an artist goes through in his work has always been an important substrate in art, but with works by artists like Jackson Pollock and Chuck Close, it has come to the foreground, and has been the carrier of meaning.

I have finished a large painting, (which I have not yet photographed) and as I sit back and attempt to take it in with fresher eyes, I am struck by the many ways my process of painting has been solving problems for me as this piece took shape on the canvas. My process of painting is like a grid on which I organize my effort, keeping me calm, and supplying a place for my ideas.

In the U.S. the vote, the process of holding elections, works in much the same way. We need to use that process as a contemporary artist uses her working process to make art. Just as the painting process doesn’t work unless an artist goes to the studio to make art, so democracy fails unless citizens show up at the polls and vote.

Alchemy started out as a still life of stones, a clay pitcher, a blue glass jar, and a clear glass bottle. Much of the first layer was done when serious illness in the family, and some rounds of especially bad health of my own, came along. While I have been able to paint regularly, I had to work at fitting the time in, and that often meant that I was pretty tired when sitting at the easel. So it took a while to get this one done.

As I worked on Alchemy, I recognized that the objects depicted in the piece are all essentially the same substance. Grind the stones into sand, and you can mix it with clay to make a pitcher, or you can heat it to the melting point and you make glass, the purer the sand, the clearer the glass. The difference between sand, ceramic, and glass is for the most part, a process. The concept of growth through process is the core idea of the painting.

What I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this is that my life was going through a similar fiery process while work on the painting continued. These times that require a fight for the time to work, often unsuccessfully, are often productive in one’s growth as an artist. I think I will be reaping benefits in my paintings as a result of this process. When I get to the point of hating the piece I am working on, I know that if I stick to my process, I might turn it into my best work. The process of living through a difficult year is a similar operation; you know that good will come of it, though you can’t imagine how.

Alchemy, oil on board, 12" x 16"

Paradoxically, I like this painting. Is this growth?

Unemployed Workers Wait In Line for Food

Today many see government support for the arts as a bonus that comes with good times, because that’s when we can afford it. Most don’t realize that government support for the arts as we know it got started because times were bad. While the Federal Government always employed artists for such things as painting murals in the Capitol building, or painting portraits of presidents, it took the Great Depression to stir up concern on the part of government officials for the well being of the arts community as a whole.

Recent events have caused us to take a look at the abyss that an economy can fall into when the system breaks down. While we all hope that we will not experience further crisis, America was not so lucky in the 1930′s. The economy went into such a complete meltdown that lives were devastated everywhere, as if we we were defeated in a war. 25% of workers couldn’t find a job anywhere, and usually there was no family member to turn to for help, because everybody was hurting.

Unemployed Workers

People in the FDR administration worried about the long term effects of this economic collapse. Those who had special skills often needed to work in areas where those skills were not relevant, such as goldsmiths taking jobs digging ditches. Over time the skills of those goldsmiths would be lost to American culture as a whole, making a future prosperity less robust, and American life less vibrant.

As a result, programs to employ artists were included in New Deal programs such as the WPA. They wanted the arts community to get through this dire struggle intact, because they wanted artists to be around in the future, and they wanted those artists to continue to pass on their training and skills to future artists.

This effort was more than successful. American artists continued to work as artists, and these programs drew many artists together in a milieu that helped the arts community to strengthen. As the arts community worldwide began to recover after World War II, it was these American artists, whose sophistication grew as they worked together in these New Deal programs, who were the ones to make America, most specifically New York, into the art capital of the world.

Unemployed Workers March

(images available by public domain)

To learn more about the New Deal and arts funding you can visit these websites:

New Deal Cultural Programs: Experiments in Cultural Democracy:  This is a general history of the New Deal cultural programs. http://www.wwcd.org/policy/US/newdeal.html

History of the New Deal Art Projects: A history of New Deal cultural programs in outline form. http://www.wpamurals.com/history.html

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