The Price of Sentiment

The small oil on wood painting pictured above and to the right are of scenes around central South Carolina. I have been doing them off and on for a number of years - mostly because people are attracted to them and therefore collect them. Some are in the collection of the CEO of Planter’s Peanuts (too bad peanuts are a sore subject for Americans these days and Georgians in particular). These domiciles on wood have also found their way to Washington DC and grace the walls of former senator Hollings’ home. There is one with the former aide to Lynn Cheney, so I’m told.
In my previous blog, I mentioned that what attracts me to these scenes are the textures and flat planes of colors. When I begin to block out these color planes, they look like abstract expressionist painting. Part of me wants to keep them that way, and recently I have done so. Abstraction forces people to see the beauty of the paint itself. But generally I resolve them into structures more recognizable than patterns within geometric planes of colors. In so doing is it compromise? I would have to say yes and no. A lot depends upon artistic intent. If the integrity of the abstract relationships is maintained despite detailing, then my artist’s guilt does not rise. But when too much of the purpose for the painting is relegated to sentimentality through depicting scenes that cause the viewer to pine for a bygone era, then I feel the conflict that many artists feel.
After all, if the subject matter takes precedent over artistic skill, then the involvement of the artist’s mind in the creation of the art is negligible. It doesn’t even matter who painted the scene - as long as it was recorded and can be possessed for its emotional appeal. It is a age old conflict for artists - form versus content, the what it is versus the how it is.
As an artist trained by the artists of the Clement Greenberg generation, the dispassionate science of the form in painting took precedence over the emotional evocations in the content. There may have been content in their paintings, but art educators and artists-in-training did not discuss them. Words that evoked engineering or construction were used to describe painting, or, in some cases, words were eschewed entirely. An extreme form of this approach was in the graduate school lectures of the artist Leland Bell. I recall long lectures at museums with Professor Bell standing in front of paintings making an extensive repertoire of grunts and other vocal sound effects. It was certainly a dynamic way of getting to understand a work of art through its pops bangs and whooshes of forms, but it made me tired at the end of the day and feeling that there was something at the crux of the art that remained uncovered. It made me hungry for content. Ironically, professor Bell was a brave and passionate man who made paintings that were very emotive indeed. Perhaps the idea behind his lectures was that content in painting was so self-evident that it need not be discussed. But I would have liked to have discussed it - what it was like to hear the music that was depicted in the little paintings of jazz men, or the relationships of the families in those paintings of interiors. The fault here is mine for not having asked about them.
I know that people collect my paintings of sheds, shacks, small houses, and abandoned homesteads for their content. It is up to me to imbue that content with form. As long as the form continues to hold meaning for me this does not entail too much compromise of artistic integrity.
In the wrangling between painting for the joy of the form itself and the knowledge that a certain look or subject will capture public sentiment, I have come to the conclusion that there is value to both. The former fulfills my need and the latter, my clients, with some valuable overlap between the two and discovery along the way.
I am told, for instance, that my clients like to have more than one little painting of these buildings. Some even have collections of them. I was happy to have collectors, but I didn’t quite understand the appeal of owning a group of these little paintings on wood until I was recovering from surgery one week and only had the strength to make small works. I painted a large collection of the so-called "Domicile" series during my convalescence. As I painted I placed the buildings in rows on a shelf to let them dry as I made the next set. While lying down to rest, I looked at the small series of houses on the shelf and realized that as a group they signified something very different from a single painting of an isolated house. I had the distinct impression of taking a drive. So that’s it, I thought, I’ve touched upon that quintessentially American thing - the road trip. It is that sentimental journey home and sometimes the sentimental departure from it towards the vistas of new possibilities. And who am I to question that sentiment? I’ve felt it myself when my husband and I go out on a drive to relax. We look at houses on our way ; little houses, large houses, falling apart houses, abandoned houses. The journey and the places along the way that we record perhaps speak to something that reassures the human psyche - that people were there, are there and will continue to be here, and, if need be, we can pack up our troubles and go.

Post Post Proteges

For over a decade now, I have been photographing and painting shacks, sheds, abandoned homesteads and other edifices that show exposure to natural wear. My attraction to these is in the intersecting planes of complex colors and the textures of vegetation that weave a tapestry around them. The green patina on a rust red copper roof, the chipped layers of paint, and the worn grey wood all are beautiful in their erosion. I have been experimenting with simplifying the forms in these painting into their basic color planes and am contemplating the significance of this kind of abstraction.
The photograph I took on a recent road trip above details the formal arrangements of colors and shapes I have been after. The scene is from an abandoned hotel in Blackville, South Carolina. In making a study for a painting from this photograph, I simplified the planes of color to delineate their formal relationships. I saw recently that a former classmate from graduate school days, Mitchell Johnson, is using similar reductions in his paintings of architecture. This should not be surprising, because we are both third generation abstract expressionists, so to speak if one care to trace from our former professor, Paul Resika, to his teacher Hans Hoffman. Where and by whom one is trained has often lasting influence. Musicians claim that they can detect a Curtis or Julliard sound in performers trained at those schools. Similarly, I sometimes can see a Parsons look in the handling of paint by artists trained in that tradition.
There is something at work, though, in the Johnson/Kozachek handling of paint that goes beyond tutelage. The patinas of colors and simple planes on the architecture of rural South Carolina look like abstract expressionist art. Clip out a photographic detail of a worn doorway and it could be a Hans Hoffman canvas. Perhaps Mitchell Johnson’s and my own affinity for these shapes and colors can be attributed from South Carolina being my adopted state and Mitchell’s own experiences as a child in South Carolina and Virginia. So influences are not always what they first appear to be and perhaps not so simple after all.

Daring Dutch Damsels

Today while continuing the process of archiving my work I came across my large paintings of steatopygous nudes. They were painted in the mid-80's while I was living in Holland and ostensibly working for the overseas division of the University of Maryland - I say ostensibly working for the University of Maryland because there were very few calls for art courses on the American Military bases where the university offered an ala carte menu of college education. There was more use for the English courses that my husband offered, so we made our way in Europe off of the military’s need to know how to read and write rather than make pictures. Understandably so.
To kill time while looking for more reliable work (I never did find any in Holland), I painted in the upstairs bathroom of our small apartment in Nieuwenhagen, a small suburb of Heerlen. Why a small space would engender the need to do large paintings I cannot say. Perhaps it was a protest over the constraints of that time and place. Contrary to the image painted in the American press, Holland was a conservative country - especially with regard to women’s rights.
Perhaps things have changed by now. I certainly hope so.
These paintings represented a reaction to frustration. No exits. No possibilities other than what imagination would bear. I did obtain some solace by painting these large fiery matrons of madness. I recall that I was reading Germain Greer’s The Obstacle Course at the time which only fueled a sense of intimidation about a future as a woman artist. Although these feminist writings were useful in challenging the status quo, I sometimes wonder how many women simply threw in the towel after reading them. Difficult odds one can steel oneself up for, but impossible ones can make even the most sanguine shrug and say "Why bother then?" So as my art cubicle was physically and theoretically defined as quite small, it only created the urge to paint these monsters of women seven to ten feet long.
These daring damsels were seen by very few people before they were destroyed, but at least they were seen. The first spectator was an old friend from our China days who visited us in Holland. Tony Grayling, as chance would have it, took a restroom break in our upstairs bathroom/studio so was treated to this art exhibition. I recall that he liked one not pictured here that had a less wooly and more sculptural finish. It comes as an odd bit of satisfaction that although the art no longer exists, the eyes that looked upon them do and that these eyes represent the vision of a now venerable philosopher in London.
The other few people who witnessed these mad Dutch ladies, were a group of men in Maastricht and a group of men and one woman in Belgium. With the exception of the woman, both groups were horrified. Understandably so. The paintings depicted women with rear ends that could wipe out Limburg province and possibly adjacent southern Belgium just by sitting on that piece of topography.
Now, years later, I have a larger space in which to paint but I paint in very modest dimensions- even miniature. I like small for myself. I paint large now only when I have a commission to do so because I slowly learned that I will end up having to stare interminably at large things that are consigned to nowhere but my own living quarters. But although I paint what I can live with, there is still that urge to bring the Dutch damsels back to life in some shape or form.

Camellias and Ivy in a Terry Gess Vase

My sojourn into the gentle art of still life painting continues with a study of camellias and ivy in a ceramic vase. The ceramic vase was made by North Carolina potter Terry Gess. Terry Gess not only has an amazing flair for creating vessels with great form but with an eye for their eventual use as receptacles for blossoms and plants. When we visited his studio, I was struck by how he would hold a vessel in his hands and describe the botanical items he anticipated filling them with.
"This is a shallow bowl for narcissus" he told us, as he held a wood fired piece with short legs and a delicate waving form. This particular piece had simple dark brown on tan brush marks. Terry Gess’ sensitivity for design as a complement to nature was evinced by his understated decoration - simple brush strokes of iron oxide reminiscent of Japanese masters like Hamada.
The vessel that I painted with the camellias and ivy has almost a pod-like shape with a narrow wedge of an opening. The design is such that blossoms placed inside arrange themselves in an informal row without falling behind or in front of each other. This was helpful for pushing the ivy out and over the edge of the vase so that it could flow easily into a splayed composition.
This was a joy to paint on a cold winter’s day.

Pairs, Pears

There was something warm and inviting about three red and yellow pears in a Jeri Burdick earthenware bowl. The warm yellow ivory of the pears stood in contrast to the cool bluish white vessel. The stem of the center pear seemed to echo the short brown lines decorating the bowl’s surface. I often paint things like that - visual equivalents to homophones. So after looking at this unpretentious bowl with three pears in it for some time as the little scene rested by the window, I decided to paint it.
I have been painting with companion artists and thought that I would take this simple still life to one of them to see if she felt similarly moved by it. She ended up painting another still life set up instead of this restrained one but still enjoyed the Zen-like simplicity of it. When painting the bowl I noticed the turquoise foot and that it was different from the rest all surrounding colors. I thought of the Chinese art principle of guest and host in painting colors. Unlike western painting, where a color is moved around the canvas, insinuating itself into other colors, Chinese painting divides colors into large masses of black or monochromatic colors and small focal points of intense colors. It is called guest and host because the host is represented by the bright spot on the page and the guests the large areas of muted, darker areas serving as a supporting cast of colors. In this case the turquoise patch is host of the painting.
Painting fruit can be useful if one paints quickly enough to eat the still life. I was a little late in getting to one of the pears and found that it was somewhat desiccated. The others were fine. I joked to my companion that under IRS regulations we can only deduct 50% of the cost of meals out of town as working artists, but 100% of studio props used for still life paintings. We are therefore obliged to eat our props whenever possible in order to fall into the higher deduction bracket.

Happy Chinese New Year

It is Chinese New Year today - the year of the dependable bull. The new year weekend was kicked off by a Saturday seminar on Chinese Art that I taught at Walnut House in Bamberg. It was a grand lady’s day. My students were treated to lessons in Chinese calligraphy, Chinese Painting, and the delicate art of carving seals (or "chops" as they are sometimes called). My host, Julia Wolfe, and I decided to make this a truly fun experience for the students. For the bargain price of $65.00, they had not only art lessons all day on Saturday but a luncheon of salad, fruits and roasted chicken whipped up by the culinary expertise of Ms. Wolfe. The afternoon featured tea with my gourmet Oatmeal, chocolate chip, cherries in rum cookies.
Today was also a celebration of all things Chinese with a modest cultural exchange. I traded a Chinese calligraphy and language lesson for a lesson in the Wu style of Tai ji quan. The Tai ji instructor knows the Wu style quite well but never studied Chinese Language or Art. I had spent practically all my time in China studying language and visual art but none of those other enticing disciplines like marshal arts, music or the exotic culinary arts. In our old age both I and the Tai Ji instructor want to fill in some blanks in our Chinese education and because we can’t afford each other’s fees, simply decided to swap lessons. It has been fun and a great way to start off the China year.

Winter Painting

It has been an unusual winter this past week. South Carolina saw snow. It was just a few inches in the north and only a dusting here in the midlands but it enough to cause delayed openings and school cancellations. The closing of infrastructures seemed nonsensical to this New Jersey lady, until I remembered how unprepared the south is for even a little bit of snow. Better safe than sorry.
The other happy albeit unusual event, was, of course, the inauguration of our new president. It was both a great joy and a great relief to finally have someone I actually voted for in office again, and someone I can actually relate to with regard to his pragmatism and his respect for science and education. For the last eight years, I had the distinct feeling of having to hold my breath while the country ran amok. Finally, with the swearing in of President Obama, I could exhale and at least hope for better times a few years down the road.
A fellow artist and I celebrated in a quiet way. We watched the inauguration, then settled down to paint a still life. The following day we watched the Marx Brothers cavort around in the film Duck Soup. This zany political satire of governments, wars, and political ineptitude served as a catharsis of the inanities we have had to put up with.
Putting the past behind us via the Marx Brothers, my friend and I painted a second still life. These simple acts, painting and watching a film on two quiet afternoons seem so unimportant in the grander scheme of things, but they were small commitments to hope for both of us. My friend is just getting started as an artist again after a ten-year hiatus spent caring for an aging mother. I have only one gallery left which doesn’t carry my mosaics, works on paper, or mid-range to larger paintings with bold themes - it seems the only thing the local commercial market will bear these days is tiny paintings of detailed views of rural South Carolina. (Not that I don’t like doing these from time to time. I just would like to do other things as well) We were both making a leap of faith these days - painting things that it is not certain that anyone will want. It is amazing what not having a market can do for artistic freedom!
Painting a still life is a humbling experience. It is more difficult than working from photographs and painting from imagination. The thing itself is there, calling the artist’s attention to details and colors which shift during the course of the day as the window light changes. One of the most recent still life paintings I just finished had to be painted at 4:00 in the afternoon every day for the fleeting moments when the light made a triangle in the composition and highlighted the copper underneath the tin on the middle-eastern pitcher. The objects I have been painting feature the crafts of other people - things that are one-of-a-kind and made by hand. They are paintings of an artist paying homage to artists. The pitcher in this painting was made by a nineteenth century Persian craftsman. Holding the object in my hands I can feel the dents of wear and see the large copper nails that the object was beaten together with. Lowly object that it was, the maker still gave it a regal bearing, with its spout that is much longer than it has to be so that water poured from it creates a beautiful arch. The small gray object in the painting next to the pitcher is a porcelain vase hand built by the potter Jeri Burdick - my favorite South Carolina Potter. No, maybe one of my favorite potters, period. I like the way the vase is pinched into being - every mark the touch of a talented hand. I also like that the vase was fired in a wood fired kiln, the ashes making a beautiful running glaze. These are the objects of my gray painting - gray for winter and gray for the blank slate upon which new plans can be written.

Money Fades Art Endures

"People first, Money next, Things last," the financial guru, Suze Orman used to say. As a creator of art things, this widely touted advice was just the thing that I didn’t want to hear. I generally doubted the soundness of such simplistic advice, though, and in light of the recent economic downturn, realize that it may indeed have been all wrong.
I first suspected that the wisdom of Orman and others was built on shaky ground when a number of truisms she posited didn’t seem to pan out. One particularly amusing one was her admonition to people to embark on the road to financial freedom by getting together all the loose cash hanging around the house and start by investing that - it almost always amounted to $30.00 she confidently pronounced. I decided to put that to the test and began a search around the house for the hidden money. I came up with thirty cents. Right amount, wrong decimal point. So if Orman was wrong about the ubiquitous hidden cash might her other assumptions also be suspect? Perhaps so - especially with the pecking order of Money then Things.
A case in point: Throughout the last decade I saw a measly IRA fund go up and down with market fluctuations creating a net gain of about 0 %. This last week I took a second look, however, at some of the art "things" I purchased a long time ago and how their value has increased over the years. One was a drawing by an art professor from my graduate school days.
My professor at Parsons School of Design had a review of his work printed in a Chinese magazine. He asked me to translate it for him and offered me a hundred dollars or a drawing. I chose the drawing. It is now valued at about $2000 - a twenty fold increase.
Back when I was a translator in China, I set aside a small portion of a meager salary to purchase antique embroideries, which sold for the pittance of about $5.00 a piece. They now sell in the U.S. for between $80 and $300. I regret now selling these for $30.00 in the years following my return to the U.S.
Understandably, it would be a challenge under the present circumstances, to sell and get full market value for anything. Turning value into actual cash is harder than it seems. But it is a buyer’s market. So for those who can invest in art objects, it might not be a bad idea to do so and hold on to them for a while. Given my limited experience with appreciation of art, I wonder at what could have been if I had invested in "things" and then cashed them in at the right time. I wonder, too, at what could have been for many folks who had disposable income but chose to invest it in the stock market rather than pay off a mortgage. Would it not have been better for them to have owned that house thing free and clear?
My recent still life paintings and paintings of homes both lived in and abandoned are a testimony to the allure of ownership of things. The small oil on board is a painting of a small rose medallion vase that I found recently. It is probably a bit more valuable than what I spent on it but probably not by much. In doing the research on the vase, however, it was fun to find out about the iconography - some of which appeared only with magnification. One such symbol is the depiction of a paintbrush across an ink stone along with chrysanthemums. Chrysanthemums are a symbol of persistence for their continued blossoming during winter. I like to think that the juxtaposition of those flowers here with a paintbrush indicates the persistence of art - and the desire of artists to create things whether a market will bear them or not.

Well into One Hundred

The number one hundred in any kind of undertaking or grouping of accomplishments is a significant number. The number appears in idiomatic expressions such as "I must have told you a hundred times," In a less negative sense and especially in the orient, we see the number one hundred to used to imply a great many things that one should take notice of, like Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views of Edo. In a recent card from one of my brothers, the front depicted a small wren-like bird resting on a snow-covered twig. The attribution on the back of the card read "From the book One Hundred Birds and Flowers in Japan." While studying art in China, I was always amazed at the frequency of the number one hundred in Chinese painting - a hundred horses, a hundred Lohans, etc.
My own book project this past year was the completion of one hundred poems for one hundred paintings, the number perhaps emblazoned on my consciousness by so many years spent in China.
This is my hundredth blog. In keeping with the idea that this should be a significant milestone, it is a good time to take stock of what it was all about and where it is going. What comes to mind first is a lesson that I had years ago from one of my Chinese masters at the Beijing Central Art Academy. Chinese lessons in the arts, in their traditional educational system, were often delivered in rhyme and parable. The lesson I am haunted by the most for fear of not being able to live up to its exhortations, was the parable of the wells. The lesson came from Master Jin, an enormous mountain of a man who specialized in a tiny detailed form of silk painting called gong bi. Master Jin noticed that it was my tendency to explore several avenues of learning at once. Although this is not that untypical of an American multi-tasker, it caused Chinese Masters some consternation. So Master Jin explained the story of the wells to me in order to underscore the folly of multiple superficial pursuits.
Master Jin, speaking in a soft lilting Mandarin began his story:
"There once was a man who started to dig a well in search of water. He dug and dug but never reached water. Exhausted and frustrated, he abandoned this project and proceeded to dig in another location. His hopes there were soon dashed as his second attempt in this new location also yielded nothing. So the man sunk another well in a third location which unfortunately also came up dry. Over the years he continued to dig wells further and further afield but always with the same empty results. Finally, when he was almost ready to give up his pursuit, he returned to the very first well he had begun years earlier. He lowered himself down into the long vertical tunnel and dug again at the base of the well, deep within the earth. He dug and he dug through the layers of clay, rock, soil and sand until, miraculously, water began to trickle in. It was a minuscule amount at first, but soon the earthly flood gates opened and a water-giving well was made."
Master Jin admonished me to remember this story whenever I found myself distracted by the tedium and frustrations of preliminary failures and given to the allure of searching for answers in novel surface pursuits and geographic solutions. It is always a challenge to stay on task and complete what I start - especially when it becomes difficult and I lose faith that my efforts will yield results. I also think of this story in the context of living in a society that virtually encourages fruitless, superficial expenditures of time and energy. We, Americans, are a people of distractions, and labor under the illusion that busy means progress.
Despite my forays into politics and criticism (politicians just made it too easy to resist) the undercurrent(pun intended) of the blog is about a slow return to original sources of artistic inspiration, abandoning what does not yield substance, and completing that which does.
The book of poetry that is in the final stages of completion was the book that I should have written eight years ago. The instruction book in Chinese art and the China memoirs which are only in the initial stages of writing, are the books that should have been written fifteen years ago. Admittedly, making a living and tending to house and home take much time away from creative pursuits - but every day that magical portion of time devoted to passion brings me closer to the wellspring of what is honest and true.
The charcoal drawing featured in this blog is called "The Dutch Woman" It is an aged and completed version of an incomplete line drawing of her younger self that I had started in Holland two decades ago!

Modest Morandi

Although I am supposed to eschew the eating of citrus fruits, I always find myself challenged in this regard during the holidays by receiving at least a crate or two full of oranges and grapefruits. I indulge my appetite although I should not and generally pay a price in pain. But this year I managed to at least slow down my consumption somewhat by making paintings of the forbidden fruits before devouring them. The first was an oil on panel painting of a depression-era ceramic mug in juxtaposition with a pale orange. Intrigued by the simple accessibility of the design and the warm, inviting colors, I proceeded to make more of these still life paintings on the theme of a single vessel and one piece of fruit or vegetable; Purple Vase and Green Mango, Pea Green Bowl and Persimmon, Violet Grapes on a Green and White Platter.
I have always been a great admirer of the painter Giorgio Morandi. He is perhaps my favorite of painters. His austere earthen toned still life paintings were, at least spiritually, the inspiration for these spare paintings. Morandi’s greatness was in his ability to capture and hold attention with Zen-like simplicity, using subtle modulations of greys and browns. When I think of a Morandi still life, I think of winter. Winter in South Carolina, however, is more like a prelude to spring, with camellias blossoming, narcissus in bloom and an exuberance of flowering quinces. It is difficult to think in blacks, whites, and greys while immersed in pink and green. My new work in still life painting for winter in the South Carolina is in the spirit of Morandi but with a hearty appetite for color.