POST #165: TRAVELING IN MY HEAD

I’m a notorious armchair traveler. This is an expression I haven’t heard used much nowadays. At one time it was used to describe someone who did his or her traveling through books – there were lots of travel books when I was young - in the comfort of their own home. Today, everyone I know is flying off to somewhere grand and exotic. “Morocco?” “Bosnia?” “You haven’t been to the Carpathians? “ No, and neither do I intend to go. I am perfectly happy traveling in my head, or if I need to get out, within a twenty mile ratio of home. If I’m going to get an upset stomach, I’d prefer to be close to familiar facilities.

In The Bardo

Diptych   66”x86”. Oil, charcoal and collage on canvas

I come by my stay-at-home genes honestly. My parents came to New York as teenagers in the early 1900s and never budged. Why should they? New York had everything they could ever want in terms of culture and ethnic diversity. There were Greek neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Chinese neighborhoods. Food shops, restaurants, clothing stores. Maybe the Metropolitan Opera wasn’t equal to La Scala (although it probably was), or the art museums the size of the Louvre, but they were more than enough to amply fill their cultural requirements. My sweet father had an extensive library of travel books, most written in the early 1900s when the world wasn’t McDonalized. I’ve kept a few. At night, he would sit in his comfortable armchair, next to out cabinet radio, listen to WQXR (the classical music station), get a book (with photos) and travel (safely) in his head.

After college, most of my friends set off on travels. Because I was needed at home to take care of my parents (I was an “only” child with elderly, unwell parents), I had a one-hour travel radius and could only go where I could be reached quickly in an emergency. Somehow, I don’t remember being envious of my wandering friends. I was studying Art History in graduate school and it seemed to me that a version (maybe not as grand) of everything I would have seen in Europe, was within my one hour time frame. So the Catskills weren’t the Alps and Coney Island not the Riviera; I didn’t feel deprived.

Heaven on Earth

Charcoal and oil on canvas
Center panel. 72” 44”

I remember listening to a woman at a party brag about her recent trip to the Carribean. I asked her if she (a native New Yorker) had ever visited the Spanish market under the elevated tracks in east Harlem? It was a typical tropical street marqueta, except that the stallkeepers all spoke Spanish with a Yiddish accent. I would go there with a Cuban artist friend and we would sketch the natives from a hiding place behind the stone pillars. But then, you couldn’t brag about going to Spanish Harlem could you?

After marrying, I had three children in five years, and since going to the supermarket with them was a herculaean effort, travel to foreign places was definitely out of the question.  When we moved to Stamford 55 years ago (only temporarily, we thought) we discovered there was no end to interesting local places to take them to and they did not grow up culturally deprived. My husband, also a non-traveler, preferred his garden to any place in the world.  He had served in the South Pacific during World Was II and when he discovered that the women of the island he was stationed on bore no resemblance to those painted by Gauguin, he lost interest in exotic places. When two of our children moved to California, we did get out and about on the West Coast, visiting the Redwoods, the Pacific Northwest, San Franscisco, but the New York Botanical Gardens are 30 minutes from our house and, except for the joy of seeing our children, we would have been just as happy going there.

Nowadays, given my “advanced” years, I definitely prefer to travel in my head. There’s enough stored there to keep me visually occupied, in fact, I’m never going to get around to using the imagery that’s already on file. I know that many, if not most, of my readers love to travel, and I’m not being critical of them. À chacun son goût (See, I even speak French.)

Renee Kahn

POST #164: HOW TO SUCCEED IN THE ART WORLD (by someone who hasn’t)

I’ve been around (not exactly “in”) the art world for an embarrassingly long time and have come up with hard earned words of advice for someone who is trying to make good in the current scene. Even though I wrote this about twenty- five years ago, it seems to still hold true.

1)      Rent or buy a loft in an up and coming artists’ slum. An ‘unfashionable’ address (i.e. the suburbs) is the kiss of death.

2)      Find the cafe where all the artists hang out and spend your free time there.

3)      Show up at every loft party and opening. Try to figure out who is important and talk only to them. Forget friends. They know you already.

4)      Sleep with celebrities – all sexes. Make sure everyone knows about it.

5)      Say and do outrageous things. i.e. Jackson Pollock got lots of mileage out of pissing in a rich patron’s fireplace.

6)      WORK BIG. Bigger is always better. Shows you have “balls”, confidence.

7)      Exhibit at up-and-coming galleries only. (No "has-beens" or "pay to play’s")

8)      Gift a member of the board or staff of a prestigious museum some of your work. He’ll be sure to promote you to increase its value.

9)      Get a National Endowment for the Arts grant; better yet, propose something  outrageous and get the grant revoked (or investigated.)

10) Find out where all the big guys in the art world go for the summer and show up in your shorts.

11)   Get a divorce and marry someone very rich or thirty years younger. 

12)   Leave your original art dealer, the one who gave you your start.

13)  Have a retrospective at the Whitney or MOMA preferably while you’re still alive.

14)  Die and have your ex-spouses, non-functional children, and greedy dealers fight over your estate. Why should you make these losers rich?
 

POST #163: Painting People

I’ve always been pretty good at painting people but not very good at painting portraits. John Singer Sargent, one of America’s greatest portrait painters, defined a portrait as a painting with “a little something wrong about the mouth,” (loose quotation) referring, of course, to the difficulty of capturing the planes of the area around the lips, but also to the fact that what the painter sees and what the subject hopes he’ll see are often two different things. Conventional portraiture is not so much an art form as a skill, something that can be learned, a form of pleasing psychophancy. Really good portrait painters manage to capture the subject’s interior life as well as a likeness. There’s also a great story about Picasso’s portrait of the poet, Gertrude Stein. When she complained that it didn’t resemble her, his response was “Don’t worry. It will.” (or words to that effect.)

Portraiture goes back several millennia to ancient Egypt when the pharaohs decided to place ‘photoshopped’ versions of themselves up there with their gods. Other ancient civilizations, including the Greeks and the Mesopotamians also portrayed their rulers, but in a stylized, non-realistic manner, more like gods than real people. It wasn’t until the humanizing influence of the Early Renaissance that ordinary mortals were deemed worthy of having their likenesses preserved. Over the centuries there have been a great many artists who could capture a physical resemblance but only a few who could - Pygmalion like - depict internal emotions as well as exterior appearance. Giotto, Rembrandt among the more noted

Once the camera appeared, portrait painting was doomed. Why bother? The camera can do in a second what would take weeks of hard labor and years of training to achieve in paint. However, even after the invention of the camera painted portraits remained popular producing some surprisingly great examples. Painters such as van Gogh and Modigliani and many of the German Expressionists, Kokoschka and (my personal favorite) Max Beckmann created portraits that went beyond mere photographic resemblance. However, for most of the 19^th and 20^th centuries photography has become the preferred way to record one’s appearance for posterity.

Today, good portrait painters are few and far between. Most of them specialize in what I call “Imperial Portraiture,” votive likenesses of Captains of Industry and Civic Leaders. And now, in the current Age of the Selfie, there’s no need now for anyone to even hire a photographer; the camera does it all.

I have never been able to “capture a likeness,” maybe because I never really worked hard enough to acquire the necessary skills, but I am good at creating “life” in my paintings. My goal is not to be a camera, but to get my subjects to talk to me, look into my eyes and tell me what they are thinking, feeling. It’s a gift and I have no idea how it came about. I recently completed a series of 54” x 24” oil and charcoal sketches on canvas.  I intended to use them in a series of paintings of Harlem I’m planning to work on next winter. However, I like the sketches so much I think I’ll stop right now. There are six “characters” currently residing in my studio, and they’re great company.