Brice Marden on Jackson Pollock Part 3.

Here's the last part of Brice Marden's writing on Jackson Pollock.

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How you look at a painting physically is very important. A good way to approach a painting is to look at it from a distance roughly equivalent to its height, then double that distance, then go back and look at it in detail where you can begin to answer the questions you've posed at each of these various viewing distances. If you go through a museum and you look at a lot of paintings in that way, it's like a little dance; it's almost a ritual of involvement. If you look very carefully from each of these different distances, you create a space that derives from the painting itself as a physical object and a visual field. When you read the levels of white light, you start from the ground the canvas and then you read the blue, to the yellow, to the red, then the whites, then you see the blacks going through, then the blues, and suddenly, if you are responding, you enter a world that is really inexplicable. The paintings world is only explicable in the sense that it is what you're looking at. That actual experience is happening to you as you look at that painting. That's why painters make paintings: To have you be in that place.

When I talk about the grayish white that runs up through white light, I have to talk about what it is for me to be in that grayish white place. As I was coming uptown to the museum this afternoon, there was the most beautiful light. New York has a great silvery light and today the city was filled with that light. The air was cleansed and the atmosphere was brilliant. As I was standing on a corner thinking, well I'm going to talk about Jackson Pollock this afternoon, I looked up and saw one bank of clouds going one way and another bank of clouds slightly in front going in another direction. And I look at those clouds and I feel these two large movements with a real empathy. And that's just what happens in white light. Different movements work against each other and with each other, and this grayish-white starts moving through the painting one way, the yellows start moving through the painting another way...

There are, of course, differences in the way you relate to the very big paintings and the smaller paintings. I know that most interpretations suggest that you enter this space of the big paintings because they provide an environment that is human scale. But I see the smaller ones as really pulling you in. Maybe because of the size of the big paintings, there's a sort of removal. We don't know for certain that he painted on stretched canvas is, so we don't know if he started with a very specific rectangle that pre-existed. But in the smaller paintings, it seems as if he painted right up to the edge, producing a reverberation off that edge that doesn't happen in the big canvases that were spread on the floor and then got cropped. Some of the black paintings, Pollock gets these great configurations that go down the sides, these kind of round things, almost like spinal columns, incredibly inventive, so that you become acutely conscious of the age of the paintings. It's almost the difference between being told a story and being a character in a story. What happens in the little ones - and the fact is that even white light and scent, relatively small in relation to one, are not really small paintings - is you become a character in the story, and in the big ones you are a witness.

Pollock gave us incredibly powerful, very direct images. I haven't seen scent for many years, and what it is as a painting, to me, has come to the forefront of my thinking. I remember seeing it and having an experience that is very rare in front of paintings. It's as if that painting is burned in my mind. I remember images in that painting; I remember there were these birds, Strange Birds. And I love to look at the Mets head, number 7, 1952, as if it's not a head, and then it turns into a monster with strange nostrils. But then it has that beautiful yellow in it, as if something spilled on it, like a studio mistake. But it's there. It does something to the painting that's just unbelievable. And the black and white paintings - I see those as almost monster paintings, with images that are really scary. Those images are not stereotypical forms; they don't drive from jungian exercises. These are images that come right out of Jackson Pollock. These are very, very strong, bizarre paintings. They have weights in leanings in them that you just can't understand at all.

I go to the Met to see number 7 a lot and I always find something that's not quite right: Oh I say, it's too bottom - heavy for me, or it's something else that's all. But I went to see it last weekend and it just came to life. I looked at the blacks, I looked at the browns, and the painting started working for me. It was a very exciting moment. Not just one Jackson Pollock but a whole great aspect of New York open up to me again. One of my favorite comments is from Maynard Solomon, talking about Beethoven, when he says that "the one thing about a work of art is that it's a constantly renewable source of energy". Whoever looks at a Jackson Pollock can get the intense energy that is in the painting. That's one of the great things about art, you can always go back to it and get it. It's always alive. Well... It's not always alive. It isn't alive when no one is perceiving it, when no one is responding to it.

Fierce effort to eliminate imagery in paintings of this kind blue poles that gives such strength and potency to the use of paint and the general impact of the picture as painting... There is no sensation of... Suppression but instead an invocation of the natural forces moving behind life. Bryan Robertson

Pollock is a very real presence in Marden''s Cold Mountain work. Ever ready to "go to his sources", Marden keeps in close view on his drawing table 4 postcards of Pollock paintings, convergence, 1952, number 32, 1950, number 7, 1951, and number 23, 1948. Books on Pollock are at hand for quick reference to reproductions of paintings and drawings. Marden repeatedly visits the Pollock paintings in New York, where he probes and ponders the work for deeper understanding. It is significant that there are multiple postcards of Pollock works in the studio, just as there are multiple postcard images of paintings by Cezanne, including a bathers and two versions of mont Sainte Victoire, Marden does not keep the images at hand out of sentiment, nor are they there as static , if heroic, icons. While Marden may view any one of these paintings, taken in isolation, as dazzling in its achievement, it is not any one painting alone that compels Marden's attention and respect. What Marden admires above all in Pollock and Cezanne, is a body of work that tracks the process of making painting after painting, drawing after drawing, often on the same subject, addressing a single problem from multiple perspectives, living with the struggle. The whole thing about making a painting. Marden says, is that the next painting is supposed to be a better painting.

Marden's position is at once puritanical and existential. He is motivated by the quest for perfection even as he knows that each painting on which he exerts such an exhaustive effort will not - cannot, must not - be as good as his next painting. In the end, it's not only the resolution of each and every painting to which Marden aspires. I admire certain pictures by Pollock and Cezanne, he says, but it isn't just the pictures. I aspire to what their pictures reveal, a true relation between artists and the art they make.

Marden closed a statement he wrote for publication in 1991 with the phrase "Cezanne, my hero." The heroic painter, for Marden, is a convergence of who one is, what one makes, and who one wishes to become. Harrowing uncertainty must coexist with hubristic will. "I am the only painter alive", Cezanne is reported to have said to Joachim Gasquet, convincingly communicating awareness of his superiority. Marden laughs with delighted admiration and repeating this Cezanne quote to friends. Yet even in the face of such conviction, Cezanne acknowledged that he was still far removed from the goal that as an artist he dreamed of attaining. 'I have a lot of work to do', he wrote to Louis Aurenche. 'It is what happens to everyone who is someone'.


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I hope you have enjoyed this text. I'm glad to be able to share it. The text comes from the book BRICE MARDEN - COLD MOUNTAIN. Published by Houston Fine Art Press.

Thanks. Jeffrey Collins

Brice Marden on Jackson Pollock Part 2.

My continuation from Brice Marden's book COLD MOUNTAIN. His writing about the work of Jackson Pollock.
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The artist's vision is not something that exists, that you know. If you know it and you keep doing what you know, it becomes a familiar road over which you travel until it ceases to be interesting. Instead, with every step toward the vision, questions arise and you pursue those questions. And all the while you're just in the studio, trying to make paintings. Pollock's paintings around 1950 - One, Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist - have an ease and lyricism. When you look at those paintings, you see an artist who could do no wrong, who was operating at a level of supreme confidence. That confidence doesn't exist in the late paintings, which convey the struggle of the artist working with his vision, attempting to enlarge his vision, going to his sources. There was a drive of his own that led Pollock through an enormous amount of work. He died when he was only forty-four and he left a huge body of work, He went back to themes and completely reworked them. One of the great things about Pollock is that he never takes it easy: there's no rote. As an artist, to go through the books on Pollock and see everything he has done...it's just exhausting! He worked very hard on every painting and every drawing. Pollock is no accidental genius. There is real thinking going on in every work.

When I look at a painting like ONE, it just seems perfectly drawn. It's not so much about the particular shape of the mark as it is about energy. Energy is drawn into ONE, as it's drawn into a lot of his work. There is the physical energy it took to make the mark, and then there's the intense energy that comes out of the painting. In ONE you see that every layer is applied in a different way, and you understand that those are drawing decisions as well as painting decisions, so that in the end you see this as an exquisitely drawn painting, and you recognize that Pollock was a masterful draftsman. When you focus on looking at a painting, always the thing to look for is how well the person draws, and drawing well is a combination of energy and control. The amazing thing about the Braque and Picasso show was that right from the beginning, you just know Picasso draws better than Braque does. All you had to do was to look at Braque's little etchings of the nude and a couple of Picasso drawings and you saw that Picasso had it way over Braque. And that confidence runs all through the work. That's the kind of confidence you see in ONE. Pollock made enormous jumps in what he tackled in a painting. Subject matter, color, form - those are all very big jumps. He had to be a great draftsman, and I don't think he had a lot of confidence about it; I think he constantly worked on it. When I think of powerful objects in the world, I think about this Pollock drawing in Stuttgart. It's black enamel paint on paper, and it's just three forms drawn with strokes of pure energy. It is one of the most compelling works in the history of art. Pollock's drawing well is not about drawing with conventional skill, it's about drawing with the body.

They say that Pollock wasn't a very graceful person but that when he was working, he was simply transformed. He could control the whole feel of the painting by going to the original ground layer and bringing it back up. The ground is the canvas, and what happens in the painting is a dynamic play between the applied and what it's applied on. Everything gets drawn. In other words, in a black and white painting like Echo, he's not making drawings of black. Every white works just as strongly as every black. And in ONE you look at the colors and the marks, and you try to redraw them. You look at the blacks and you follow the way they went on the canvas, then you follow the whites, say, then the browns.... But there's always some point where you lose the trail; you just can't read it because it never reads as layering. It's nice to think, well, he did the black at the same time and we can follow those marks, but when you really start looking at the painting, there are places where the black is over the white, and then there are places where the white is over the black. I don't really know how he was working those colors, how he could go back and forth between colors and layers. The colors may look layered, but I think there was a more organic flow between what looks like the bottom layer and what looks like the top layer. There just seems to be so much more: Pollock doesn't let the painting read as layers, and all those marks and colors become the real space of the painting.
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More to come. Thanks for reading.

Quote for the day 12-22-2010

Today's quote comes from the great painter Barnett Newman.

"The new Painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality, but the penetration into the world mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets. To that extent his art is concerned with the sublime. It is a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life which is it's sense of tragedy."

Written in 1945 Long before the birth of Onement. But you can almost see the future out of this writing from three years earlier.



Cheers.

Quote of the day 11-02-2010

Today's quote comes from art critic Harold Rosenberg.

"Bad painters can be produced by a phrase, but a good painter is never identical with any definition."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Rosenberg

I finally got to see one.

I finally got to see this wonderful Adolf Reinhardt painting. 5ft square. Black. But not truly black. It is a slow painting that unfolds with the more time you put into viewing it. Sometimes I began to wonder if I were seeing things just from looking at all the black for so long. But it did begin to work it's magic on me and I began to see the red, the violet within the painting. The strange thing is that, of the reproductions I have seen of these paintings. You usually can see what looks like a cross pattern within the painting, with the cross being painted with a glossy sheen and the rest a very matte paint. But this one in particular did not have any of the sheen whatsoever. Which kinda threw me a bit, as I always thought that each one had that cross pattern within it. For as much as I looked at it, I could see no pattern within the painting at all. There are slight views that let you think there is an almost checkerboard pattern within it, but I don't know what I think as to that matter. All I know, is that I FINALLY got to see one. After all these years...more than a decade, I finally got to see one of the Reinhardt square black paintings. After viewing the rest of the ab-ex show at Moma, I now feel even more minuscule as a painter. These were painters that really hit you over the head with their work. Which makes me wanna work on my paintings even more to find what they found. That power, that intensity, that scale. Seeing Barnett Newman's painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis really made me realize what scale is truly all about. It stands before you, defiant of your thoughts and pushes right back at you. I still can't get these images out of my head.



1963. Oil on canvas, 60 x 60" (152.4 x 152.4 cm). Gift of Mrs. Morton J. Hornick. © 2010 Estate of Ad Reinhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

If you get the chance while this show is up. I highly recommend that you drop your preconception about New York and get there to witness this amazing show of all the Abstract Expressionists (Though I think they missed Milton Resnick)

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3ATA%3AE%3AAbExFeatured&page_number=8&template_id=1&sort_order=1

Oil Sticks and flattened out wood pulp...

Lately on top of my working on my paintings. I have been focusing again on my oil stick on paper drawings. If you could call them drawings. As they are definitely not recognizable forms. Though the first oil stick drawings I have done were using your basic shapes, squares, rectangles, etc. This has become one particular thing I have liked what it was and wanted to develop it more.

Color is the primary focus of these works, and the ways I approach the materials is a physical mannerism, which helps make the drawing turn out the way it does.



The works here were done on 80LB unsealed paper, within the most recent of drawings, of which I have yet to take pics of. I have begun working on 180LB Primed cold pressed watercolor paper.

For archives sake.









All oil sticks were Windsor and Newton Oil Bars. Very wonderfully workable oil sticks with gorgeous color.

More to come...

Rothko and uses of materials.

After visiting the National Gallery in DC last year, and taking a number of photos. Most of which didn't come out the way I had hoped because these new cameras pretty much always need a tripod, if you aren't using the flash.

I was visiting the section with all the Rothko's and Newman's, one thing really hit me about the one particular painting from the Seagram Mural job he did. How crappily it had been painted.

As you can see in these pics. The one painting from the Seagram murals has got some pretty crappy paint that Rothko used in these paintings. I don't know what the hell kind of paint he had used on these paintings. But it sure wasn't artists grade oil or acrylic paint.

I've heard many stories about how he was always using cheap materials in his paintings. Which is not what one should be doing when you are a serious painter as he was. You can look in these pics and see where one section of paint has bled through the rest of the paint on top of it. It almost looks as if someone had taken a torch to that section to make the other paint seep through the top coat.

Seeing this really bothered me, as I really try to take as good care of my paintings as I possibly can. As do my other painter friends. Only in my very first paintings were I not using high grade artist acrylic paint.

Thinking about this painting and it's bad aging, leads me to think of the Rothko Chapel in Houston where he has his largest paintings. Which from his uses of materials, and his being stingy with the cash flow he had been given for the set of paintings. We today will never be able to see the paintings as they were when they left his studio. I know they have been "restored" but in cases of restoration, it never turns out the same way as the original had been the day it was finished. If you want to learn a bit about how restorers can be, just read the book "I was Vermeer"...it'll tell you about a number of ways restorers over the years have screwed up painting after painting.









Here's where you can really see some of the results of using inferior materials. Thankfully he didn't do this on all of his paintings.

So in lieu of the above. Please let me say to all of you painters out there who wish to be selling paintings like crazy. Give a thought to the future and how you would want these paintings to look after 50 years, 100 years, and then ask yourself...is this house paint really something I should be using on this canvas. Think about the people who will become your patrons, spending their well earned money on a painting of yours only to have it fall apart after 15-20 years. And go to your local artist supply store and put down some money on the good stuff. You'll feel a lot better about it in the future, when you can look at your paintings and they still look as good as the day you finished them.

I have also seen a number of older Twombly's where they are now under glass, as the paint has literally fallen off the weave of the canvas.



Oh it's so sad to see great paintings go bad.

Interview with David Reed

Just wanted to share a great interview with the painter David Reed. David was the artist who picked one of my paintings (one called "Gaining Acceptance") to be in the Ohio Art League show back in Sept. 2000. I got to finally meet him in 2004 when I made my first pilgrimage to the capitol of the American Art world. NYC.

Here's a wonderful interview with him, he speaks a bunch about a favorite painter Milton Resnick and what his thoughts about painting were. I only wish I could have been engaged by a teacher like him.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/visualarts/2008/10/web_exclusive_an_interview_wit.html#post

Enjoy the read. You can see more of David Reed's work at... http://www.davidreedstudio.com/

February has dreams of spring.

Wow that actually sounded poetic.

I just wanted to find a nice title for this entry. But didn't want it to sound to0 artsy.

Yesterday a new painting came into this world.

I have given it the title of many other paintings. The date it was finished on. Along with a subtitle that brings you a bit more into the painting as opposed to being put off by a title that is simply a date.

"02-01-2009 (Knowing)" 18"X10" A/WF/C

The subtitle is a bit esoteric, but I like it that way. Give you more to "know" about. There is Knowing and there is Unknowing, then there is about-to-know, which I am in that state almost all the time. I think....

The rest of this entry will speak for itself.



Right Detail.



Left Detail.



Thank you for viewing.

New painting for the new year

Yesterday I finished my newest painting. A development in color for me. This wonderful meeting of Hansa Yellow and Green Gold on this textural surface. Creates some stunning transparencies that glow within the surface.

"01-27-2009 (Dreams of Spring)" 18" X 10" A/WF/C



I decided on the subtitle "Dreams of Spring" as it's got around 3 to 4 inches of snow outside right now. Slowing everything in the town to a snails pace. Good for contemplating painting, but not if you've got a bunch of things to do. Such as promoting my show with the WAC which is running till February 7th.

I was a bit on the weary side when beginning this final stage of painting. As I haven't really meshed with transparent colors much. As I always thought it created a bit too much of a monochrome surface, but as it was drying, I realized that these colors are really creating a wonderful depth within the surface of the painting. That makes me wanna develop this series of working with more transparent colors further.

Here are a few large files of the details of this painting.









Thanks for viewing.

Jeffrey

James Kalm introduces us to a new side of Still

A Human Level of Painting.

As a result of my difficulty of looking at large format paintings. Attempting to view the highest extremities of these large canvases, makes it hard for me to fully enjoy taking in these wonderful works in color and form.

I recently went to the National Gallery in Washington DC, where I finally got to see a decent amount of Abstract Expressionist paintings. My first Motherwell, my first set from Barnett Newman. But in my viewing of the Rothko paintings, seeing just how high on the wall they had been hung. Made me realize why Mark asked people to hang his paintings low on the walls. Supposedly at a more human level, as these were definitely not hung at that level. I am 5'9" tall and don't like looking at a huge painting that is hung on a wall at a point where the middle of the piece is right about eye level.

To me this is very wrong in practice, as it should not make your eyes strain to try viewing the top of the canvas. It makes it easier to view the bottom of the painting, but to myself and to many many more who visit these places everyday, we would like to be able to REALLY view the top of the canvas at a reasonable height, so as to get a truly good view of the rest of the canvas. Which as most painters paint, the top is usually the beginning of the painting, and gives one many ideas of how the canvas was brought into a painting. This high level of paintings on a wall simply takes away from the viewing of the painting and makes the painting...made by a human, act more as if an alter to worship at as opposed to what it truly is. A Painting made by a painter so that other humans might be able to receive the same feelings the artist is trying to convey.

J.C.