Gary Grier show, Charleston

We decided sort of last minute to drive down to Charleston, SC, on Friday to catch the opening reception for my good friend Gary, who is showing alongside printmaker Lou Stovall (read a review here). The drive took much longer than anticipated with the baby, but luckily we made it in time and I got to catch up a little with him and a couple other old schoolmates, Sean and Shane, who each came from out of town as well for the big night. It was so surreal seeing these guys again after almost ten years – we were all noticeably more mature (at least on the outside), yet it felt like we had parted ways only months ago.






As Gary told me, much of the work in the current show was a result of his walks to and from his studio, just outside of Charleston’s elegant and prosperous downtown. With the feel of the pavement beneath his feet day after day came the realization that here were neighborhoods in decline which needed to be preserved or at least documented in paint. I'm always impressed by the sincerity of his paintings, and it was especially awesome to be able to stand in front of a large group of them for the first time. Maybe just experiencing an old friend’s brush marks in person again was inspiring enough, but I got a real kick out of all the rich ochres and neutral browns in his middle shadows, those great Old Master colors that inspired us so much during our days at school. On Saturday the two of us spent a long while in his studio talking about paint and reminiscing about those good old days, and I left on Sunday morning with a sense of renewal.

Overall our experience of downtown Charleston was a brief whirlwind tour, but we had enough time to do some strolling, get all messy at a little crab shack just beyond the fancier establishments on East Bay St., and visit the Gibbes Museum of Art where I surreptitiously photographed a couple of paintings that I found interesting:


- a modern looking Robert Henri; and a portrait by Antonio de la Gandara of the infamous "Madame X," which the unfortunate lady commissioned in the hope of undoing the great scandal caused by Sargent's earlier painting. (See them better on the Web: 1, 2.) The Henri piece was part of a small, eclectic group that included a W.M. Chase portrait remarkable for a sketchy part done in Gary's same browns and ochres; a large and almost garishly loud Childe Hassam; as well as some magnificent Hokusai and Hiroshige prints.

On the drive home through the Carolinas there was an extremely strong wind, and we passed through dust clouds and the smoke of what we later learned were huge brush fires just before the Virginia border, which turned parts of the sky amazing shades of red and purple. It was a fantastic end to a pleasantly surreal weekend.

Mango

2/6. Mango, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

According to the Golden Artist Colors website,

The story of Indian Yellow pigment seems more like myth than fact. In the Bengali province of India, farmers raised herds of cattle fed only on mango leaves and water. The urine from these cows – bright yellow in color – was collected and dried to produce the pigment for Indian Yellow. Unfortunately, the cows were extremely undernourished, as mango leaves did not supply the cattle with sufficient nutrients, and they lived for only a very short time. The process was considered inhumane and, since 1908, Indian Yellow pigment has been prohibited from the market.

Wikipedia says, "In Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer's patron remarks that Vermeer used 'cow piss' to paint his wife." Actually, if true, the practice described above would have been inadvisable to begin with, as mango leaves are toxic and cattle in India are sacred. Also from Wikipedia,

In her 2004 book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay examined whether Indian yellow was really made from cow urine. The only printed source mentioning this practice is a single letter written by a Mr. T.N. Mukharji of Calcutta, who claimed to have seen the color being made. Aside from this letter, there appear to be no written sources from the time period mentioning the production of Indian yellow. Finlay searched for legal records concerning the supposed banning of Indian yellow production in both the India Library in London and the National Library in Calcutta, and found none. She visited the town in India mentioned in Mukharji's letter as the only source of the color, but found no trace of evidence that the color had ever been produced there. None of the locals she spoke with had ever heard of the practice. It is possible that Indian yellow came from another source, and that the cow urine story was fabricated by Mukharji, but came to be accepted by later authors. As such, the viability of producing Indian yellow from the urine of mango-leaf-fed cows is unknown.

Idiom!

LAUNCELOT: ... At last! A call, a cry of distress! This could be the sign that leads us to the Holy Grail! Brave, brave Concorde! You shall not have died in vain!!
CONCORDE: Uh, I'm - I'm not quite dead, sir.
LAUNCELOT: Well, you shall not have been mortally wounded in vain!
CONCORDE: Uh, I - I think uh, I could pull through, sir.
LAUNCELOT: Oh, I see.
CONCORDE: Actually, I think I'm all right to come with you, sir -
LAUNCELOT: No, no, sweet Concorde! Stay here! I will send help as soon as I have accomplished a daring and heroic rescue in my own particular... [sigh]
CONCORDE: Idiom, sir?
LAUNCELOT: Idiom!


Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975.


I’ve been in one of those periods of uncertainty, when I wonder if I might ever get my particular idiom figured out. I know that all along I’ve been honing certain qualities that are definitely "me," but there are infinitely more trials and errors to make and more paths to explore.

Painting isn’t so difficult when you don’t know ... But when you do ... it’s quite a different matter!

So Degas said. I envy those who are seft-taught, because I’ve always believed they can retain more of their original selves in the learning process. Sometimes I feel so detached from my old way of seeing (my creatively boundless, high school art class way) because of good teaching - some unlearning of it here and there will probably be necessary forever. Of course this detachment could have been caused by the gradual filling in of my brain’s more potent recesses by all that cortisol from depression. If only I had a Pythonesque cartoon brain-cleaning guy up there to scrape away the residual plaque.

(For those who have never seen this, and those who have:)

Supermardi!

Flag of the U.S.A., wood, 9.3x17.7 in.

I hope everyone who lives in a Super Tuesday state took part today in this complex rigamarole (our voting day is next Tuesday). I can never figure out this process, but I guess that’s why they have panels of pundits on TV to talk about it.

While watching the tiresome, recycled news analyses last night, I decided to start something I had been wanting to for a while - a painting of the flag in its proper proportions. Is this a big deal? one may ask. I don’t know. But I know that almost all of the U.S. flags I have seen in my life have been drawn wrong, and I’ve seen a million of them just as anyone else has. Seeing the flag as it was meant is to me like a fresh reading of the Bill of Rights, so maybe it is sort of important.

Our flag is a beautiful thing. Graphic artists, more than anyone, should care that our most important symbol be reproduced like a trademark exactly the same everywhere. Imagine any famous company’s logo and lettering printed at different proportions from one location to the next. For whatever reason our flag ended up with the ratio of 1:1.9 – although "Executive Order 10834" permits official flags in three other sizes with different ratios. One of these is 3:4, which is also great for a bumper sticker, but I'd prefer the flag be more than a mutable and generalized pattern of stars and stripes. Do a search of U.S. flags and see the differing dimensions and the usually careless arrangement of stars in the union which leaves too much extra space. Notice the flag in the background when a government official speaks on TV. Perhaps many flags used by government are drawn to the specifications but I've seen a wide variety. Even if they're all being made in China, I would think their measurements could be regulated. If shirt companies can lay out embroidery according to a specific pattern, why can’t flag manufacturers do the same?

Some people don’t care about etiquette, and some don’t care about flag etiquette (I might not if I owned an inaccurately drawn and cheap piece of visual garbage). Some people refuse to salute the flag, and a candidate for president (I won't say who) was recently photographed doing this while the national anthem played. It seems bizarre to me that a person hoping to become the representative of the people would refuse to honor that symbol which represents them all. It represents each and every one of us and we really ought to treat it well.

Here I’m drawing it in its right proportions. I find sometimes I need this kind of mindless, mechanical and masochistic exercise. There’s no way to get it wrong because the numbers tell me what I need to do - I can’t imagine how long it took the person or committee to officially decide on these measurements, but they are what they are. Originally I had wanted to use a large wooden board, but last night I went with a small piece of scrap just under 18 in. (45 cm.) across. I hope all the little stars don’t drive me crazy....

Grapefruit

2/2. Grapefruit, oil on linen panel, 5x5 in. SOLD

I fought with the grapefruit's surface colors, going around in circles trying to make the form more solid. This was just under two hours I think. I'm happy with the coloring overall though, and am ok with where I decided to leave things. A teacher once labeled me as a colorist (based on the few things he saw me produce, he added) and I'm always glad to have some decent colors if nothing else.

Onion #5

2/1. Onion #5, oil on linen panel, 4x4 in. SOLD

I'm starting to understand more the idea of limiting the value range, at least in the way that it affects the shadow area - leaving the shadow mass soft, still anchoring the object without having to put the darkest darks there. Instead, the darkest note is in the area with the most interest. I luckily got the right colors down real fast and this turned out to be only a little more than an hour long.

Banana #4

1/31. Banana #4, oil on linen panel, 4x6 in.

I was playing around in this one, leaving out some of the shadow details. Getting myself to see things a little differently.

Potato Cairn

Potato Cairn, oil on canvas panel, 10x8 in.

(Why have I not been capitalizing the words in my titles?...) This was a good exercise and I probably need to do something like it once in a while, but I was glad to finish it. I was up late painting it, which made it feel like it was taking much longer, but it turned out to be just under five hours including the previous night.

Potato cairn, WIP

Potato cairn stage 1 and 2, oil on canvas panel, 10x8 in.

I allowed myself less time to paint last night, so I'm breaking up this piece into two sessions. Not having a bigger linen panel ready, I used a RayMar canvas panel that was sitting around - with the surface sanded down a little and a quick drying layer of paint scraped smooth over the canvas texture (I scraped with a palette knife, leaving paint in the little depressions).

I wanted a simpler exercise in light and dark, and a setup with potatoes seemed right. And I realized the previous night that I tend to get too wet with medium early on, so focusing on the light I thought would also slow me down and keep things dry longer. I stacked the potatoes like this because the more I thought about them the more they felt like stones, and what can you do with stones (non-violently) that is more primeval than stacking them in unnatural ways?

Little bear slippers

1/28. Little bear slippers, oil on linen panel, 5x7 in.

I've finally gone to a white background! Please "bear" with me as I adjust some other colors and possibly change my banner in the coming days.

We saw these slippers the other day at Target on sale for a couple of bucks, and our daughter loved them immediately. She barely fits in them because of all the puffy stuffing (we might have to perform some surgery on the insides) but that doesn't stop her.