POST #183: Back to the Drawing Board

 

I was recently ruminating, (having nothing better to do waiting for the plague to end) on why artists stay with one style (or why they change their style.) And the more I thought about it, the more answers came to me. I’ll run some by you, but I’m sure you have explanations of your own.  

The main reason an artist is famous for work in one single style is usually the obvious one:  he or she died before they got around to exploring new ideas: Seurat, Modigliani, Kline, Basquiat, Haring, just to name a few who never lived long enough to move on (assuming they even would have wanted to.)

“Imaginary View From a New York City Window”
Oil on canvas 68”x46”

Then there are artists who stay with a style because it is their nature, their rigid personalities discourage experimentation. Mondrian, for example, once he achieved his signature rectangular grid, often worked on the same paintings for years, making minute changes, rarely achieving the perfection he sought. But he was rigid in all aspects of his life; contemporary photos show him working in a spare, immaculate studio, in suit and tie, moving pieces of colored tape millimeters to the left or the right.  Some artists find a formula early on and stay with it. They’re probably the same way about everything they do: what they eat, what they wear, how they make love.  They draw comfort in achieving “perfection” in a narrow band, not in experimenting with something new.

….and then there are artists like Chagall, a genius who was capable of invention but found a formula early on that his buyers wanted: floating lovers, rabbis, scenes of Vitebsk and farm animals (don’t forget the cows.) You knew a Chagall the minute you saw one and his admirers gobbled them up. He never changed because he was successful, financially and otherwise.

On a more mundane level: a highly successful painter I know from my Music & Art High School days (he exhibits in major Madison Avenue galleries and invests in New York real estate) has been painting the same semi-abstract Vermont landscapes for over forty years.  They’re not exactly the same: sometimes the view is from the North, sometimes South, East or West. But he has a wonderful color sense and his “faux Cezanne” daubs do look like they belong in a museum.  There’s enough variety to keep his clientele buying what they think is new work. The so-called “gurus of the art world” either ignore him (or hate him) but, as he once told me: “I cry all the way to the bank.” He’s especially popular with Texas zillionaires who love to decorate their homes with art work that looks sophisticated, but is “easy on the eyes.” They grab up everything he does. He’s a businessman first, he admits, and a businessman stays with a product that sells.

City Scene
18”x12”. Oil on Panel

But why are Monet or Cezanne, who remained with the same subject matter for decades considered great artists and my Vermont scene painter always a hack? My theory is that it has to do with intent. A true artist, like Monet, who painted the same subject over and over, sought some intrinsic truth that only repetition could bring. It’s like a meditation mantra. To get to the essence of an object or a place one had to do what psychologists call “break set,” break down a formulaic way of seeing something by staring at it intently for a long period of time. The goal was to see better not sell better. Cezanne’s multiple views of Mont Sainte-Victoire were a perfect example of an artist using repetition as a way of penetrating deeper into a subject’s essential identity, its solidity, its changes with weather, time of day. He didn’t do it because he thought there was a market for mountain scenes.

During my decades as a working artist, I’ve learned how hard it is to generalize about art and artists. There are geniuses like Mark Rothko (an all-time favorite) who committed suicide - possibly because he found himself “stuck in a style.”  Like Jackson Pollock, success didn’t allow him to move on. The public wanted to buy paintings by Rothko and Pollock that looked like they were done by Rothko and Pollock. They were among the many artists who got rich and famous only to discover their creativity hemmed in by dealers, debts, houses in the Hamptons, ex- wives and wayward children. Forced to keep producing the signature work associated with their names, they killed themselves.

And on the other hand, another of my gods, Philip Guston, walked away from the fashionable art world, locked himself up in a farmhouse in Woodstock, New York and created powerful, disturbing and original work that was only appreciated decades after his death. Like Alice Neel who is only now getting her due, his time has come and his greatness recognized.

 

Lovingly submitted

Renee Kahn

 

POST # 182: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN’T BUY

In a recent (and rare) clean-up mode, I came across a Dream Book I had kept several years ago. In it I wrote down a half dozen vivid dreams I somehow managed to remember. As my readers probably know, it is extremely difficult to remember dreams, probably because we’re not really supposed to remember them. Acquiring the skill (and keeping it) requires a great deal of effort and practice, but if you succeed, it’s well worth the trouble. Oddly enough, my Dream Book recently disappeared; I have searched everywhere, but it is gone. Perhaps having served its original psychological purpose, it has now become a dream. 

I’ve always been attracted to Surrealism. It’s one of the more interesting movements in 20^th century art, a subject I taught at the University of Connecticut for many years. The decades between World War I and II were veritable dream factories in Europe, and later, during the war, the movement was brought to the United States by an amazing group of expat artists, most notably Max Ernst and Dorotea Tanning.  My favorite artist of the period was Kurt Schwitters who left behind his masterpiece, the “Merzhaus,” an imaginative reconfiguration of a townhouse in Hamburg, Germany (although I don’t think he ever considered himself a Surrealist.) Spurred by psychoanalytic theory, Freud and Jung created a scientific basis for the interpretation of dreams. However, Hitler’s Third Reich did not prove to be hospitable to dreamers and most of the artists and psychoanalysts of the period ended up as refugees here or in England during World War II. Our gain; Europe’s loss.

My Dream Book provided me with lots of interesting images, only a few of which I was able to convert into art. The closest I ever got to succeeding were a series of quasi-surrealist paintings and drawings I did while recovering from a broken ankle in my daughter’s eleventh floor New York apartment with windows overlooking West End Avenue and the Hudson River. The magical views have shown up in dozens of paintings. Real, yet unreal? Surreal?

 A number of years ago, I decided to try to remember my dreams. For some reason, I was having incredibly imaginative ones at the time – ones I felt worth saving. I was previously never able to remember them but someone told me that if I go to bed telling myself that I must remember - and then write the dream down immediately after waking – usually first thing in the morning - I might be able to retain them. The technique apparently worked and, after a few weeks, I had a notebook filled with extremely vivid dreams. I tried turning them into paintings but they were too complex – with the exception of one that showed my late husband floating in the Bardo, a Buddhist term for the time between life and the afterlife. He had returned to tell me how happy he was, free from earthly cares and how his magnificent, athlete’s body, much to his delight, was now a spiritual one floating untethered and undamaged in space.

I recently went back to that dream painting and added a pair of 6’x4’ stretched canvas panels similar in color and technique. These recent works are not of the Bardo, but a curious mish-mash of pre-historic cave painting combined with Picasso, Chagall, Calder, cut-out dolls and Cubism. Now, how’s that for an artistic stew? Twenty-two years of teaching art history has come back to haunt me!

 

POST #181: CREATING LIFE

Whenever I create “life”, my goal is to get my subject to talk to me. Like Donatello’s Renaissance statue of Il Zuccone, I want it to speak. My late husband, a clinical psychologist, used to call it my “only child syndrome.”  I’m not painting a person; I’m creating a person, a playmate, a companion. My studio and my attic are currently filled with cut-out characters. I occasionally work from photographs that I or someone else has taken, but only as a starting point; most of the time I am totally surprised at who turns up. I never idealize people; I want them raw and rugged, the way they are in real life: lumps, bumps and all. I draw upon decades of sketching at Government Center meetings, or Breakfast at Curley’s; it’s like I have a giant photo album in my head that keeps spilling out images. Recently, I’ve learned how to use my iPhone to take photos without my victim realizing his image was being captured. I pretend I’m talking on the phone or looking at something behind them, lest they think I’m invading their privacy.

Most of my figurative work, because it is so true to life, is controversial. Am I making fun of people of different races, ages, ethnicities? Satire, nowadays, is a touchy subject. At what point does gentle humor transcend into racist insult? I have to be very careful where I show my work and hope that no misreads my intent. A few years ago, the local Downtown Council asked me to put my life size “real women” paper dolls in a storefront window but then they panicked at my pregnant teenage bride. Was she Latina? Would someone be insulted? I thought she was adorable and apparently so did the hundreds of people who walked by that weekend. The only objection came from a tormented soul who threw a cup of coffee at the window claiming I was making fun of fat people. When the dolls were exhibited in a gallery in New Britain recently, I was asked to give a talk about the work. Would someone accuse me of political incorrectness? Fortunately, the audience, a dozen women of mixed ages, races, sizes got my point. They understood the affection behind my satire.

Over the years, I have created a half dozen series of paper dolls on different topics, some exhibitable, some not. The one I’ve never shown publicly is my Mens Bathhouse series. You need a strong stomach for that one. It’s based on the observation that nudity is not what it’s cracked up to be and most people avoid it for a good reason. The dolls are 24” high cut outs of the kind of men you see at zoning board meetings: well-dressed thugs. It’s my way of getting back at them for all the damage they have done to my beloved city. They are ugly inside and out and only a George Grosz could really do justice to them. I do my best.

The most powerful series I ever did was of local gangsters – 8’ high cardboard figures meant to be held up so the carrier’s legs were the legs of the puppet. They are crying out for a script by Brecht, but he’s not available and I don’t know anyone else who can do it. They can also be displayed on tripod wood stands, lit so they cast giant terrifying shadows. I wish I knew of a gallery big enough accommodate them; it would need 20’ ceilings.

Goddess of the New Popular Restaurant.  Oil on canvas. 62”x 48”

Meanwhile, my characters live mainly in my attic. God only knows what goes on there at night when I’m not around!

Glad to be back,

Renee Kahn

POST #180: Apollonian vs Dionysian

The philosopher Nietzsche was the first to write about the presence in our lives of powerful forces that he referred to as Apollonian or Dionysian, referring to the Greek god Apollo who represents order, reason and beauty, as opposed to the Dionysian, our wilder selves represented by Dionysus, the god of wine. Dionysus creates chaos, madness, sexual depravity and drunkenness and is usually expressed by wild, licentious music and dance. It’s like a carefully organized Bach fugue versus an orgiastic Woodstock performance to a spaced-out audience. Nietzsche saw the need for both elements in a life well lived: the rule of law and rational thinking balanced by the need to let loose and have a damned good time.  In the healthy, well-adjusted person, both stay in balance; it’s when one element predominates and drives out the other that trouble ensues.  Artists tend – at least in the current art scene - to be more Dionysian than Apollonian. But given the unpredictable world we live in and our often irrational “supreme leader” it’s no surprise that most contemporary art has an air of hysteria about it: over-sized, over-pigmented and over-dramatic. How can an artist possibly be Apollonian in this crazy, irrational world?

In the next week or two I’m planning to conduct a design workshop for a few artist/photographer friends. Our topic is something we used to refer to in art school as the “Principles of Design.” I intend to talk about timeless verities such as balance, harmony, focal point, rhythm, and relationship of forms, all the qualities required to create a harmonious (Apollonian?) work of art. But what if there is no such thing any more? Why should there be harmony in art when it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world?  Maybe the chaos of contemporary life requires a whole new set of Unprincipled Principles of Design and I’m just wasting everyone’s time teaching order and rules. Maybe I should just pass the mescaline and let everyone be his or her inner Dionysian selves?

P.S. in my pre adolescence, I used to be a Duncan dancer, a disciple of Isadora Duncan, a passionate Dionysian if there ever was one. We danced in flowing scarves and Grecian togas with wreaths of flowers I’m out hair. A sight to behold!
R.K.

POST#179: TO DRAW OR NOT TO DRAW, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Harlem Figures: Charcoal and Oil on Canvas 24"x 54"

My friend George recently recommended a book from the 1920s by Harold Speed called “The Practice and Science of Drawing.”  Staying in print that long, I’m sure it’s an excellent primer on the art of drawing but it begs the question of whether anyone needs or wants to draw any more. Given easy access to computer and photographic images, is it even a necessary skill? When I began to study art as a teenager, drawing from life was the basis of all our training. The entrance exam I took at the age of 14 for the High School of Music & Art in New York City was largely designed to see whether or not I could draw. My best friend and I still remember the contour drawing we were required to do for the exam; neither of us had ever done one before.  It was widely accepted among artists that before you could study painting or sculpture, you had to know how to draw. I remember telling my friend Elena, a graduate of the prestigious Moscow Art Institute, that I had met graduates from the top art schools in America who couldn’t draw a hand. She sniffed and haughtily replied that in Russia, you couldn’t get into art school if you couldn’t draw a hand.

Cut-Outs Projected onto Canvas Drawings

 

But drawing, while it might be “technically obsolete,” has certain advantages over photo derived images. It forces you to actually LOOK (stare) at something, study it. Get to know it. It is one thing to photograph a tree and its branches, but a totally different part of the brain is required to draw it, to understand how everything connects, how light and shadow create roundness and depth, the texture of the bark. In drawing from life we learn about a subject in a way no photo can ever teach us. Just think about what we get from one of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings. Better than a photo any day!

"Dream" - Charcoal Drawing on Stained Canvas 60"x48"

There is also another kind of drawing that’s almost impossible to teach: pulling images from the subconscious, the so-called ‘inner eye.’ It’s something that can only be accessed after long experience in training the ‘outer eye.’ Many artists never learn how to access the millions of images they have stored in their brain, the so-called ‘imagination.’ Frankly, that’s where the really interesting stuff is found. But, before you get to the inner eye, you need to spend an awful lot of time learning how to draw what’s in front of you. 

POST #178: TURNING PHOTO-LEMONS INTO PHOTO-LEMONADE

Projected Wall Image

Projected Wall Image

I recently received an e-mail from a photographer friend (one of the best I know) asking me to give him a crash course in photo composition. While my technical skills as a photographer are “weak” (to be kind), I’m really good at composing images. Those of you who know me know I hate technology; anything that requires me to press more than two buttons sends me into a panic. But all those courses I took in Two-Dimensional Design in school plus twenty-plus years of teaching art history on the college level have sharpened my eye to the point where I can take the most mediocre, banal image and crop it into a masterpiece. For many years I was invited by local camera clubs to judge their shows, although I was careful to explain that I didn’t know an f stop from a hole in the wall. But what I could do was take the really bad photos they projected onto a screen and, using my fingers, crop them into works of art. You could hear an audible gasp from the audience when the miracle took place.

“Under the El“. Overlapping projections. 6’x8’

A few years after I graduated art school, I decided I wanted to paint a series of urban scenes (a la Ben Shahn.)  I bought a ‘point and shoot’ Brownie camera for about $3 dollars plus a couple of rolls of black and white film (all there was) and went down to the Lower East Side to photograph architectural details. I never got around to the paintings and the photographs along with their negatives went into a drawer where they inexplicably remained untouched for over twenty years. As 2”x2”snapshots, they were truly awful, but for some reason, I took them into the local camera store and had them enlarged. The level of detail was extraordinary and I discovered that each print could be composed/cropped into a half dozen reasonably successful photographs. In fact, the quality of the enlargements, given the basic point and shoot technology of my Brownie camera, was so remarkable that I was even able to make 6’ posters without loss of detail. My negatives yielded a treasure trove of urban imagery I’ve been mining ever since. A few years ago a cinematographer friend, CiCi Artist and I made a movie out of the photos and around that time I put together an illustrated book of Lower East Side memoirs provided by friends. I also created and “environment” by projecting the photos onto four large gallery walls, allowing visitors to become part of the scene. By the magic of judicious cropping, my amateurish Brownie snapshots turned into a gift that keeps giving.

Projected Wall Image

POST # 177: HOW TO BE HAPPY: (lead a creative life)

Projection 4’x3’

Projection 6’x6’

In the car the other day, I accidentally tuned into a Ted Talk on the value of a “creative life.”  The speaker (didn’t get his name) was talking about two psychologists who were familiar to me: Abraham Maslow, a founder of the Family Therapy movement who died about fifty years ago along with a present-day disciple of his, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, creator of something known as ‘Flow Theory’. It turns out that many of MC’s ideas came from Maslow. My late husband, a PhD Clinical Psychologist, was a follower of Maslow, considering his family therapy techniques to be far more helpful in “curing” neurosis than Freud or Jung or any of the dwellers in the unconscious. Want to be psychologically healthy? You need to find something creative you enjoy doing and do it!

Since I tuned in late to the interview, I only caught the tail end of the discussion on the therapeutic value of creativity.  Both Maslow and MC (and my husband) believed in its “curative” powers. Sam had great success with patients, accustomed to having therapists who probed their unconscious and listened endlessly (at great cost and to no avail) to their neurotic complaints. He focused on his client’s healthy parts, not his or her neurosis. If the patient liked to write or play an instrument (whether he was good at it or not) he or she soon learned that that was what Sam wanted to hear about. He didn’t want their same old neurotic complaints. Therapy sessions became joyful and positive and within a short period of time, change in the “kvetcher” (Yiddish for complainer) was obvious to everyone. Maslow called it “Self Actualization” and MC referred to “The Flow.”

Projection 8’x6’

When Sam caught me whining (yes, I occasionally whine) he would open the studio door, put his hands on my shoulders and shove me inside, slamming the door behind me. “I know what you are doing! You’re just trying to distract me,” I would yell. But after a few minutes in the studio I would notice something that needed my attention: a painting on canvas, a large charcoal drawing.  Within fifteen or twenty minutes, my mood lifted and I would begin to dance around the studio, brush in hand. Life was good. It didn’t make problems go away; it just put them in perspective.

Projection 7’x4’

Maslow believed that what he called “Self Actualization” was critical to human happiness and suppressing the creative part of ourselves was what makes us neurotic. Doing what you love, writing, playing music, performing has a deep therapeutic effect. My husband’s mantra was: “Activity binds anxiety and Creative Activity makes it go away altogether.” So, take out your crayons or your fiddle and get to work  (and read some Maslow or Csikszentmihaly’s Flow Theory if you want to understand why.) 

Renee Kahn (now off to her studio to create)