View from the Studio

Remembering Martha’s Vineyard and Wade Johnson

2011-08-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

Atlas Was a Woman, oil on canvas, 12" x 14"

I was painting something partly from memory at the base of the Edgartown Lighthouse a week ago. The day before, I had sat there and seen a woman go out on the beach and spread a blanket, which billowed briefly as she flung it out in the wind and the sun. I had noticed how it conversed with the sails on the horizon, showing a kind of signal apropos of Penelope, perhaps, and the others of Odysseus. Or maybe she is Atlas, and Atlas is a woman. I had long ago considered something about a picnic blanket and the map of the world to be synonymous when we are very small children, and our mothers produce all the geography of our early life, first in the astronomy of their own body, and then in these quadrangles, which they come to occupy later, perhaps alone, as this sun bather was about to do.

And as I painted, I was listening instead to the wise man of the lighthouse converse with my wife, Lynne, somewhere behind me. Their voices would waft in and out of my consciousness, as painting makes one deaf at times, and I marveled at the calm and intelligent and passionate strains of this Thoreau of our times – a certain Wade Johnson, as I would later meet him – the lighthouse keeper, and in his own words, the light keeper of that little place in the world.

He would point out that people from all over the world came here, and he didn’t care which side of politics they were on, when he sent them upstairs to witness the view, they came down different. He called it the Wow factor, which brings us all together in the experience of wonder. He said that in life, this vestige of architecture that was originally created for hope and rescue, for the reckoning to safety by early mariners, was still performing its function in a charged political climate.

He thought the thing to do was bring people together in this way, around the drive to preserve and save this place, and our shared world. He would address his charge of public responsibility onto Conservative and Liberal equally. He would trick some into going up for free, on his invitation, and he said that no matter how hard the case of “what, me pay for that [lighthouse, public project, your salary]?” a visitor suffered, he would always pay as he left, softened by the solvent of sun and far-sightedness into a wiser persona.

I think it is not only the landscape they saw up there, which moved them; perhaps also the fact they had to duck through a little opening at the top to get on the walkway around the light that humbles like an old monastery door in Greece; and perhaps it was these things together with the time it takes to reflect on the voice and the man who waits below. The ideas of Wade Johnson are so articulate, so freshly wholesome, so knowing and yet hopeful, so innocent, yet so ready to reason. He is highly educated, but stands in the commons, delivering the citizen’s news to his fellow citizens, enlightening and uplifting them, at a moment when the world seems a financial jumble.

One by one, the world’s citizens look from Wade Johnson’s lighthouse, and before they leave they have a bit more confidence about what can still be done. I think perhaps he may know the President, and that he would be a welcome guest of his, as they share the kind of Common Sense which is native to the people of our country. A little more cooperation, a little more trust in reason, and we might move forward once again.

I have pleasantly, industriously, sometimes in frustration that opened into progress, spent a few hours painting, lulled by the conversation that drifted over me. Perhaps this leant the painting its particular bliss. I think an earnest voice, a clear voice, a calm and wise voice, is what we need. This is not a man of impatient lectures, nor a man who sees the world as a tomfoolery of hoaxes wrought on us by scientists. No, our tradition of wisdom and common sense, of thoughtful and considerate passion, of hope in the present as well as the future, is created every day the lighthouse keeper is at his post.

Wade Johnson sees the boats into the harbor and the vacationers back to their play. He oversees the center of the world, the way Thoreau considered Concord Paris. It is just as important to be intelligent where you stand. It doesn’t require a stage, or a special province, nor the city as such. And yet, a lighthouse is a signal – the one where you can find him. This is a sample of America, this is a hope in the world.

Me, Wade Johnson, and Lynne

August 21, 2011
-- Philadelphia

Lynne Campbell, Celia Reisman, and Christine Lafuente

2010-12-05T10:48:00.000-08:00

Lynne Campbell and a series of her paintings

An interesting thing about this show is its frequent reference to nature, and how the artists relate to that subject in the way they paint.

All three are known to frequent Maine, but only two seem to use motifs from that landscape. In Christine Lafuente’s work, oil paintings of dashing brio imbue often quiet scenes with a passion and energy that upends the themes of gray with the thrill of painting. Seeing is as exciting as something very youthful in us, these paintings say, and they notice color as a blazon, as something startling and enlivening.

For Celia Reisman, scenes of Maine are a chance to create wonderful rhymes of shape, a chance to simplify form and detail into lovely abstractions that inter-relate across the painted surface. Neither painterly-ness, nor impasto, are her objectives, but a modest stepping away, a replacement of realism with something embroidered out of the real. If there are Platonic shapes and colors, then this is the artist of those. Her edges remember the lilt of line, emphasizing that we follow the way nature and human arrangements compare and contrast with each other, even in something as subtle as a house edge, a lily garden and the landscape beyond, which she holds together in a certain light and design.

For Lynne Campbell, the idea of Maine resides in not being there. She equates thinking of with simultaneity. Were she in Maine, she might well be thinking of a wildlife refuge near home, imagining how life goes on in a space we know, but cannot be present in, except by the reverie of painting. The sense of a movie, of time passing from one stage into another, interests her. Time is her distance. This is worth knowing, because it explains the duration and way of looking her paintings encourage. Like Haiku, they seem simple and brief, yet one lingers in their silent grace, appreciating the visible world we often over-number with details and thereby give up as chaos. To her the woods are woods, not single trees blinding us to the ensemble. And yet she picks a focus, and relates something to that. As in Celia’s paintings, and Christine’s, there is a relation between parts that makes us feel, in this case, the serenity of nature’s order.

To see like this, and for these reasons, we require artists as guides in the visual adventure of life on earth, and the life of our spirit.

John Sevcik

At Morpeth Contemporary
Hopewell, New Jersey
Since November and continuing within the Holiday small works show

Life and the City

2010-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

Michael Bartmann next to one of his paintings

Michael Bartmann’s paintings at Rosenfeld Gallery this month reflect an ongoing interest in the architectural side-stories of modern urban landscape. These industrial spaces are often views of underpasses, or views from inside abandoned factories that open somehow. Both sorts of views share the idea that a wall both interrupts and opens to another space. In some cases his paint examines a wall as a means to express a certain slice of space itself.

His method of layering paint creates enigmatic distances punctuated by scratchings, scrapings, or thickly applied pigment. Amid the overall earth tone of these powerful yet quiet pieces there is a nice sense of color work, which leads one toward the light of day in some area of the painting.

This seems to confront an oppressive notion of confinement with release. The architectural element often presents us with a sort of Platonic ideal, which the overall tone and color work also seem to debate. Is this beautiful, or sublime? Is a repeating pattern of daylight cast in receding perspective depressing, or does the change in that light promise release and redemption?

In most cases the paintings also remind us of the structure of space, of how it outlasts usefulness, of how a sort of enigma remains behind in our midst capable of evoking the mathematical sublime. As sea shells have a beauty that outlasts their lives, these parts of a city have the noble imprint of some mighty purpose, capable of Roman arches, straight edges, and a function ultimately given over to transparency. What we are reminded of in the end is how daylight reclaims the man-made shadows of these constructions, as water does the confines of a shell.

Also on view are Thamer Dawood Sudani’s colorful abstractions that seem to narrate life force as a light filled with incipient symbols, language, and lamp-like exuberance. His family’s story of escape from Iraq gives these hopeful canvases a particular poignancy and heroism. They speak to the question of the invincible human spirit. Only one piece seems able to afford to place this exhilaration in the context of what must have been lost, but, in their way, both artists here deal with what can be dealt with in the appropriate timeline of their experience. In both cases we are surprised at the phenomenon of expression and experience, and moved by the power of the imagination to focus that experience at its most vital and necessary questions.

Until January 31, 2010

Michael Bartmann and Thamer Dawood Sudani at
Rosenfeld Gallery
113 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
215 922 1376

The Sleep of Reason and other oracles of art

2009-10-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

The sleep of reason was the condition Goya named as beginning the grotesqueries and nightmares he witnessed in his extraordinary book of etchings called Caprices. Even the sardonic use of a lighthearted term shows the nuance of what it means to abdicate thoughtful responsibility. It is also a defensive term to underplay the strength of his indictments via the harrowing journalism of his eye and the wickedly ironic titles of those images. It is not surprising that Goya’s intense realism, his honesty, his risk in speaking out, was rewarded with exile – the one place, short of death, the free artist is allowed to go when taking up a critique of society.

To condemn cruelty in the way Goya does, and aristocratic self-indulgence, is a way to make specific the grand pageant of Christian suffering as a matter in his own time. By contrast, Breughel’s oblique criticism of the depredations of the Counter Reformation in Flanders (The Slaughter of the Innocents) is a more cloaked critique that used a contemporary depiction of ancient martyrs to shame the sadists of his day. Goya’s modernism is in his avoidance of this age old method of creating historical metaphors in painting. Goya depicts the disordered state of his own world.

It may well be that when all are subjective, when all are in the thrall of some cruel insanity of belief-based hatred, that the subjective response is one of reclaiming reason, reclaiming the objective state. Who can see this way, and from what position?

Goya’s privileged position as painter to the King’s court was similar to the access Moliere achieved in the French King’s court of his day. Both men were allowed to grow in their worldly and moral satires, because those kings were themselves enlightened enough to share some of those opinions and allowed themselves to be entertained by others. Similarly, in Breughel’s life, a prince bought most of Breughel’s paintings, enjoying their views of the lives of peasants.

In our later age, as kings and court were closed as offices of patronage, someone like Caspar David Friederich, who celebrated the social revolutions in Europe of 1848, became an outcast. A few years later Edvard Munch was jailed for knowing an important anarchist. These are the steady drumbeat of art as conscience, and society does its best to prefer aesthetics to truth and subjectivity to reason. It is perhaps more interested in applying reason in the aid of subjective states than the other way around. Classicism is a nice example of rational depictions of what are irrational stories. Throughout the Christianization of Classicism, or really the classicization of Medievalism, we still see the artist decrying the destruction of kindness by oppression, and celebrating the victory and hope of the soul. In such storytelling, the good outlive the evil in repute. In that tradition, in my lifetime, a Pope helped undo the cruelty of an oppressive system of government by symbolizing the suffering of God, or the soul’s intention, in society. He suffered both exile and attempted murder. When there was a pause in his exile and he appeared in Poland, the chief of state’s knees shook with fear on meeting the Pope; such is the force of truth and the woken state of reason.

The dogma of Christ is nothing but love and tolerance. The many smaller dogmas by which people conflict themselves violate the example of Christ and the spirit of the greatest Dogma, which is born of the love of mother and child, the love of spouses, the love of lovers. Love is a human knowledge of humanity so extraordinary that it is enshrined in Divinity, which may as well exist, so strong is our feeling for what is true and good in us. The essential friendship of people, which can be destroyed by lies and hatred, is a likewise sacred thing toward which great literature and painting urge the viewer.

The fallen and the risen both know this thing in its true light, or in the shadow from which they envy it. It is as universal a knowledge as many lesser truths like counting and spelling, and so also undergirds religions and the toilings of philosophers, even if their disputations lead to a negation of their original motive.

An artist is the likely liquid of a modern age, able to pass among people without a seeming office or position of power, only a commentator off to one side seeking to please by beauty and truth, and discovering the time living in us. Almost by accident a shock occurs. Like Columbus still, we are shocked by the great distance west to Asia, and shocked by the intervening discovery, not able to recognize what, in fact, we have discovered, nor how to treat the people we encounter.

In the sleep of reason there is enough wrong to supply delusion on a mass scale, but the objective state in our subjective nature reveals enough that is eternal and true to bring us up again, and again, generation after generation.

This is the meaning of culture, its long repetitions, its rediscoveries, its persistence in the face of cruelty.

The Blue Hour

2009-09-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

At Rosenfeld Gallery this month a show of Leslie Fenton’s works of paper, literally torn, wrinkled and opened and dyed and painted and soaked and handled and assembled into beautiful abstract paintings, shows what can be achieved in the inspiration of the imagination working with almost impossible tools.

If you place your hands on paper and work it by wonderful alterations, a real artist can summon from the scraps something magnificent, delicate, fierce, or watery. Ms. Fenton has made these materials into paintings that reflect the impossibility of their creation by appearing created by time and processes altogether natural and graceful.

A surgeon with the same hands would be highly sought after. This sensitivity to the tissue of sight is practiced on all the pieces in the show, but the one I most prize for its illusion of infinity, and the light of its title is The Blue Hour, a large work that deserves a longer life of exhibition, as might be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Blue Hour is a term for the interval before dawn, when the sky begins to brighten and illuminate the world in a soft blue hue. People rising early would be known to appreciate it, and be familiar with its magic. This painting allows that experience in daylight, and gives forth the same benediction of a kind infinity returning us to earth from sleep and forgetting.

Some have spoken of a morning light in painting. This is an entirely extra territory. With this artist, night, the dark spaces in trees, the color of rock and sand and cloud, make up the world that hasn’t been covered enough. The work is palpable, synesthetic with a new sense, not bas relief, but very much reminding us that something slight and fragile makes up the orchestration of the cosmos.

Until October 4, 2009

Leslie Fenton
Mixed Media on Paper
Rosenfeld Gallery
113 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
215 922 1376

Subjective Natures

2009-07-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

Artists are understood to practice subjectivity almost as a professional trait. Their vision, their vocabulary, their language are frequent terms used to warn onlookers that what they are coming to see consists of having to practice a sort of translation into the state of mind of the artist. The artist, for his part, has been trying to enter the state of mind of say “nature,” or spiritual truth, or the sublime, or the truth of gesture and action painting.

For the Impressionists, the subjective newness of their art consisted of looking seriously at the modern world as a subject. Their charm was their sense of celebration, via the effects of light on dappled lawns or the dance of light on water, or the very dance of the artist’s brush on canvas. Forms of mental distress were viable means of altering the image, as Van Gogh did, or exile, as Gauguin did, or an evolving abstraction, as Matisse did. The loner could express in a pre-cubist mosaic of colors, as Cezanne did, and the list goes on.

Were these things done before? Certainly Goya took other than what we would call the official line on war in his time, and El Greco found a manner of painting that exaggerated the form for spiritual reasons. Mannerism itself was an altered state of reality, and recognized as such.

It is the moment when a subjective state seems to be the most real take on things that it takes off in popularity. That may not coincide with the date of the innovation, and so the (clearly subjective) history of art that I propose includes a concept of the oh-so-much-more-real. Comparing an Inness to an Albert Pinkham Ryder one has to admit the more real emotional state of delirium on Ryder’s part, and the more real state of rapture on Inness’s part. It is in these ways that we value them most, not in the factuality or primitivism of their means. And it is because we can be objective about the subjective that we understand the equal merits of great artists. Artists are not all doing the same work, although they work in much the same faith to arrive at their different realities of emphasis.

Another way we show we appreciate a great range of subjective states is by the popularity of museums, and the adventure of seeing new art by contemporary artists. Even if befuddled or outraged, the engagement and curiosity of the viewer is a singular force driving the growth of art.

Can art run out of subjective states? My experience as a teacher of art suggests no. I practice a rather Hippocratic method of teaching, in which I work with the tendency of a student and try to help realize in technical matters what the prototype of the artist in the student’s work is showing. I have never seen two people in the same subjective state, although I meet with many in the same literal or objective state. It is the habit of students to attempt an escape from the subjective through an appeal to the literal. If only they could get that right, they tell me, it would really look like the model. If only, if only, and yet, the thing they often see as misshapen is really a form of exaggeration, or a nuance of adjustment that announces very clearly what they are trying to say.

A long struggle ensues during which I try to save the artist while educating the critic in the artist to know what he may treat as correctable error and what he should respect as a subjective truth. It has been a marvel to me that this art instinct resides in almost all people who come to me. It resembles the inner working of life itself, in the way a particular form of life will weave itself from an inner knowledge of its own design, never getting the chance to see itself in the mirror to make adjustments, as it were. The inward way is already well prepared in both the artist and viewer. For whatever reasons of living and experience, for whatever friction between hope and dismay, for whatever ideal the cynic suffers for, or sad reality the dreamer mourns, a person will take up a cause in art as in life and make a semblance of the things that rouse or delight him for their correspondence with his inner truth. That truth, shared by us in our own workings of life and loss, are recognized as the appropriate matter of art. We see in the subjective truth of art that truth we ourselves harbor in tandem with the artist. We say with this that a larger reality tinges all real things with a certain mood, or energy, or tone of color. And it is about that larger reality we all share and all co-create that we are concerned with in the study and making of art. It is for this reason that the literal fails the test of art, though not that of craft. And it is because we recognize that craft is an attempt to remove the subjective that we relegate it to a second place. Craft alone is not beauty, although laudable in its means. The place it takes, although it fought against it, is the industrial prototype. The more perfectly it is made, the more desirable it becomes as an anonymous matter, a fact worthy of reproduction if one could come by the factory to do it. And it is because the great craft object remains aloof from industry that it threatens the mass produced by its uniqueness, and by the eros it creates in the machinery of reproduction to exploit the design so proffered and denied a license to.

It might be thought that design itself is the subjective, and that art and craft are really one, along with the other matters the Bau Haus attempted to unify. This is not so, because design only covers the matters of form as apparent to the eye. The subjective reality of a Ryder, or an Inness, precedes and supercedes design. It works not on the matters of denotation, but through the effects of connotation. If anything, the great paintings denote less by design. Part of their design is in their unfinished state, the unfinished state that emphasizes one dovetail of nature over the others. Were one to look at a wonderful craft piece – say a silver piece by Paul Revere – and a painted version by an artist of that same craft object, one would see the added appeal the painted image has, because of how it imitates, recreates, in fact, the experience of that silver piece, and what it means to the artist. Without the felt addendum of an artist, the craft piece is always complete in itself, available for analysis, appreciation, but exquisitely objective.

However, craft pieces are sometimes also considered an art of subjective means. Furniture’s animistic past, silver’s mutability of luster, the quilts of Gees Bend, have language and secrets that fulfill the subjective requirement of art. Should we go back to an earlier definition of art, we would find many activities of people fit under the rubric of art, art as a special knowledge, art as a subjectively discovered means of truth. In its totalities, summed together, these make up a time. If one examines one’s times by a study of contemporary arts, and finds them wanting, one is obligated to set off on the journey of one’s life, to set the objective things right by the subjective truth at one’s disposal. It cannot be that one will be entirely wrong, though he may be considered wrong-headed, literally heading in the wrong direction. But the wrong direction has been proven out before as a right direction, or at least a viable one.

An art creates us, so also we create an art.

Lynne Campbell, painter

2009-02-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

Wingohocking (bluejay), 2008, by Lynne Campbell

The art of this painter, with which I have been familiar for many years now, is perhaps hardest to write of, because I have seen all of it, and because I am so close to the artist. I must be careful not to read into the paintings things I know about the painter, and yet, to explain the artist is sometimes a help in appreciating her art.

While still a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Lynne began an interest in the square format, not that she hadn’t created in another format, but it was this shape she began to explore as a window. Notice that the equality of the sides is a very even and calming equilibrium between the vertical and horizontal. It resolves at the outset what classical composition must struggle to obtain. Unlike classical composition, which balances horizontal and vertical by increasing the meaning of the vertical, Lynne’s composition begins in a state of harmony. The implied vertical distance, supplied by classical art’s belief in the divine (think of John the Baptist’s finger pointing upward in Leonardo DaVinci’s painting), or in mannerism’s exaggeration of the vertical (as in El Greco’s figures, streaming heavenward), here is made equal to the horizontal. Such paintings could only be created in an age of post enlightenment; it sees into the world according to nature’s equidistance from us.

Sighting (silently), 1993, by Lynne Campbell

In her early paintings in this format, Lynne Campbell used the occurrence of manmade structures in the natural or wild landscape as evidence of the mathematical sublime – a term De Chirico used to describe the metaphysical effect of certain large manmade structures in the world and in his paintings. Whatever marks time, or endures time, would give him that effect, thus the clock’s presiding over statues or classical ruins, with a train crossing the horizon far off. Time and timelessness keep track of each other, emphasize each other, in those paintings.

untitled, 1995, by Lynne Campbell

Entry, 1996, by Lynne Campbell

For Lynne Campbell, who especially loved De Chirico’s paintings then, the mathematical sublime was visible in oil tanks, or water towers. The water towers became an important motif, after the interest in oil tanks seen in refineries. These early compositions had high horizons, and the sources of oil and water seemed to require that. They were studies of the earth as a source of one or another elemental fluid.

Return, 1997, by Lynne Campbell

With the water towers, an eventual shift took place, and the horizon moved to the bottom of the composition. Water’s other source, the divinity of air and weather, became acknowledged, and it is about that time that she and I became bird watchers. With that interest a new motif became her obsession, the sighting of a bird.

And now I will explain how like Agnes Martin these square, abstracted skies, become. They contain the slenderest piece of horizon. There is the equilibrium of the format, and then there is the placement of the bird in that context. The way the space is divided, the way the line of flight enters, or predicts its passage, all balance in a remarkable way. The object of each of these compositions, whether they include energy or the stasis of humidity, is an extraordinary serenity.

Late, 2004, by Lynne Campbell

The serenity of nature is not what she implies in these paintings, but the serenity of the onlooker. She is showing a certain viewpoint, in which we are at the moment between dwelling on a sky-filled landscape and noticing a passing bird. The sense of the cosmos, of the allness of the sky has us absorbed, and the bird noticed is placed in an incredible fit within the viewer’s universe. It is not locked-in so much as released-into. The environment and the inhabitant are as one, imbued with the spirit of each other. It is in this way that the older classical vertical direction has been made imminent. One can see spirit right there before oneself. Centuries of science and understanding have brought us to the potency of the present. These are paintings possible after Emily Dickenson, and after the general awakening about the fragility of the environment. They are a discovery coincident with that which holds that life evolves from its surroundings, that context matters, and that passage moves through the creating air of our life.

Wingohocking (goldfinch), 2008, by Lynne Campbell

Observations like these are timeless because we can understand they were always true, even if they now seem recently new, beginning the wave of the present age. While in the city, the birds were part of the urban environment, passing over rooftops with the complete ease of belonging. Now, though still in the city, they constitute a series named for a street that in Lenape means “a good place to plant.”

Edward Sozanski has termed them visual haiku, admitting their spare means and profound effect. As poetry does, they awaken us to a sense of being, and a state of awakened bliss. Though many are summer or winter visions, they grant that first truth of seeing the spirit of life, the spirit most of us assume each spring when we wake up to the sky and the weather in a state of bliss. If a Buddha were to come as the face of nature, he would make us compassionate in the way these paintings of our nature make us feel.

Fidelity

2008-04-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

The thought that now begins to occupy me concerns the question of how art advertises life here and now. Because our culture has met up with nihilism again in an old form—the form of religious renunciation of life and its happiness—there is a need to revisit the meaning of religion.

Religious narratives of history and being seem to follow the Romantic notion of a lost Eden of Joy, which reappears after death. This literal interpretation is a mistaken hope. What seems more likely is that human perception begins in a form of bliss, matures into a drama of conflicts and ends in an armistice of hope. All of these can be seen as worthwhile stages of life, and it is the celebration of this life to which they add their intimations of immortality. Eden and Heaven are here and now. One can live in them or Hell, as the Buddhist reminds us. And it is in the conscious choice to live fulfilled lives of civilization, cultivation and enjoyment that make immortality present. The ancient Greeks would even consider such people to have become like gods, implying by that the notion of true living.

It is in this sense of art as an advertisement for life that we can make sense of all the partial efforts of consumer advertising, of pop art and op art and expressionism, of abstraction, surrealism and realism, of impressionism or the Baroque or the Renaissance. What the consumer is always being promised—taste, beauty, style, wit—are tools for the ages-old consolations and celebrations of life. Except as they promise to substitute buying for living, they contribute to the herd instinct which is looking for something called happiness. Be it found at the remove of a vacation purchased via Southwest Air or at a restaurant table for two at an expensive venue, it finally comes to the thing for which art has always been creating access—from cuisine to couture to truth and beauty. Art is a means to bring us close to life, but life is in the living of it. Henry Miller essentially said the same. Living and happiness are what the fuss is all about, even to the point that a person can find happiness in truth or the beauty of difficult things.

Experience in art is also less material, by the very nature of art’s simulacrum, by its reduction or abstraction of the world into a two-dimensional vision prepared for the cave of the retina and the deeper cave of consciousness, itself. This has some effect in making art nearer to spiritual ideals, and less the material world it reflects or uses. Because it operates on our sensation so directly, it is tantamount to thoughts and dreams. These are the fields of immortal reflections, the constancy of principles, the repeatable experiment. We hold truth to be self-evident, so also art. It is there or not. We may hold the higher consciousness of ourselves and the world in our hands and not perceive it in a contemporary artwork. It may be there or we may mistake it to be there. Later in life we may understand it all as what our time needed to see. It is a message from the light of day—a Platonic ideal of the Mediterranean climate. The shared vision, the shared meal, the climate whose temperature and pleasure makes people feel intimate with themselves, each other, the day itself, the sun. All of this keeps calling us to live as best we can in the interval allowed us on earth.

Elementary Particles

2008-04-14T18:50:00.000-07:00

“Honey, I shrunk the universe,” I could have said to my wife after writing a previous blog entry here (The Fallibility of Perception). I treat my physics speculations as light humor, because my experience in science was brief and long ago. I once studied astronomy with a real hope of a life in that science, but somehow was lured into art.

By coincidence, some aspects of art and science – perhaps the most interesting to us as people – are similar. Both arise out of an interest to describe the universe to ourselves and each other. While a description may satisfy me alone, it cannot be acceptable to others if it seems inconsistent with reality or is disprovable by previously ascertained knowledge.

In painting, if the artist neglects the volume of space in which the still life resides, there is a flatness to the painting which lacks the compelling authority of, say, a Paul Chardin, or a Cezanne still life. We are thus familiar in art with the inference of reality. After all, we can see by inspection that the canvas is a flat surface. But stepping back we experience depth in the best paintings. How have we inferred this illusion? It is by the artist’s knowledge of how the eye reads reality. To test this, you can view a good painting with one eye only, and still experience depth. Do this in looking at the world and the world will go flat.

In science, there are many cases in which our unaided senses cannot make the correct inference about the universe. Without a prism, we cannot know light is made of colors, although long ago people attempted to deduce this knowledge from the appearance of rainbows.

Back to the artist. If the artist combines all the colors in paint, he does not get white light. How come? And so much for artists having anything to say about science, you may add.

But it is in the nature of inference that science and art are kindred spirits. Science proposes a model, with an experiment as demonstration, and invites the public to its carnival tent for the entertainment of understanding the magician that is nature.

Similarly, the artist shows a concept of the world – admittedly one immediately accessible to the eyes – and says, come in and be dazzled by nature. The audience, always on a quest for entertainment and knowledge, is happy to be awoken by science or art to a sense of its world.

The audience has seen apples before, of course, but Cezanne’s apples wake them to the notion of admiration, even love, of apples. The audience has seen the moon before, but after Newton they think of gravity and the tides and the nature of orbital motion. They can envision a human being in orbit around the earth and they can infer the nature of the earth’s travel during a year.

In this sense art is specific and science leads to generalization. The audience of a month is enjoying a rather abstract reality. But what is not abstract about a painting? Only because we wish to enjoy illusion and because we wish to enjoy understanding, do we succumb to art and science.

Now it is the question of perception that I raised before on this blog, which is the bedrock of both science and art, and which also gives rise to the nature of inference and illusion. In science, perception is aided by experimental instruments (the prism, the Geiger counter), whereas in art it is still the eye itself, once our primary instrument of science. It is the eye that still attempts to imagine concepts like the particle-wave of physics, and the nuclear structure of atoms. It infers these matters by its power of illusion only, because we are assured these elementary particles are not objectively visible – even though vision itself operates on account of the autonomous properties of light.

Where science would like to boil things down to a simple explanation, art accepts many explanations, and the notion of local conditions and nuances of perception. (Think of Monet’s haystacks paintings in their many different lights, or the many views of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Cezanne.) And yet science gets more complicated the longer it studies the world. The very concept of an elementary particle, which began long ago in Greek philosophy, has devolved by experiments into a plethora of elementary particles. And it is due to this multitude of elementary particles that the very philosophy of an elementary particle stands to be undone.

Not only is the elementary particle a quaint notion by now, the single universe is much in doubt, as well. Once, not so long ago, we had the single sun, the single galaxy, the only solar system, the only earth. Science, by its dogged scrutiny, approaches the perception art has long enjoyed – that the universe is not simplified, it can only be elaborated.

The turn in science was not entirely necessary. The photon is considered one of the early elementary particles. After centuries of thought and analysis, science conceded to a sort of binary description of the photon – that particle which conveys a quantum of light, and which is also a wave. Try constructing or imagining an irreducible element (a point) as a wave. Or, try imagining a wave as a single particle. It does not work in our normal way of thinking, but we infer it as a reality, the way we infer love in a Watteau painting – because we see the players in a love story.

It is in accepting the description of the photon that physics was on the right path, and in ascribing more and more elements to individual characteristics that it lost its powers of description. It is as though physics has gone ahead and decoupled the photon. Ie., in this experiment we show the wave decay and give off a particle, in the next, the particle decays and gives off a frequency of light energy.

Besides the likelihood that there is no ultimate particle, there is the likelihood that there is an elementary particle – already known – that can change identities under differing conditions.

Take as a metaphor people. If a human being speaks Russian, and another speaks Chinese, does an extraterrestrial scientist classify them as two distinct species? Then if the Russian immigrated to China, and after some years spoke Chinese, would he have had added to him the C-particle of Chinese and lost the R-particle of Russian? We here know that he was a person in both cases, and that that was his elementary identity, not to be confused with his language behavior, important though that is.

What I am trying to describe is a Universe that, even in its most basic sense, demonstrates behavior that is individualistic. True, it can be predicted by polls and quantum dynamics, but so can the likelihood that a Russian will try to learn Chinese while living in China. Being and context may be maintaining freedom and limits across the entire spectrum of existence, not only in the field of human action, or human thought.

I am free to think this blog. It is limited to what survives the test of reality. But where reality remains in a fluid state of description we may need to think fresh thoughts. The artist tries the world on through his particular lense. We grow to consider that particular sensibility as one we can share. The way of seeing is also a way of feeling and a way of conceiving the relationship between the human being and the world. That it is subjective makes it no less true.

It is possible the electron, the photon, the proton, each has a subjective relationship – subject to the contingencies of its existence – the way a bee moves to the next flower suggested by the breeze, or in opposition to it. We should not expect we are made of rocks, nor that matter is inanimate. Even rock has a fluid past, and nothing about the Universe seems inanimate to an artist. To an artist the moon and earth and sun are dancers, family members, even gods – but certainly not inanimate matter.

Spirit is in the very fiber of being. Freedom is the elementary particle. Art exists to celebrate this, and science to discover it.

Reflections on my show

2008-02-23T11:21:00.000-08:00

English Channel (Night) was the image I chose for the postcard. It was based on a small oil sketch I made in Paris in June, 1994, from memory and a drawing made the night before while crossing the channel. I had in my mind the distinct and troubling experience of sensing, during part of that trip, the effort of so many of my father's generation to liberate Europe during D-Day. It struck me how powerful a feeling resides in certain places, and of course I could say this is only my subjective experience projected upon the world, because of a certain knowledge . . . and yet . . .

Knowing I was going to Prague later that summer for the first time to see relatives there, and that my father had just gone there before me, was bringing our family's history to a unique sort of closure. The cold war had continued to separate my father from the land he had fought to free, and this one trip he was taking was to be his only return to the land of his birth. I think I was quite conscious of him and his struggle on that crossing.

One experience I have of art is the effort to convey my empathy with those who have gone before. Landscape evinces the passing of some moment, like a stage after drama. We know a place can often serve as memorial -- and so it felt to me.

The following was a statement I wrote for the show, under the show's title:

Myth and Landscape

The paintings based on the Greek myth of Hero and Leander owe a debt to the Veronese painting of Diana at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, due to the sequential events narrated in that painting. This in turn is retrieved by Veronese from earlier Medieval examples.

The myth of Hero and Leander relates the love story of Leander and Hero (a priestess at the temple of Aphrodite). Leander swims nightly across the Hellespont to be with her, guided by a fire she lights for him. One night a storm puts out the light and Leander perishes. When Hero finds him washed ashore, she kills herself as well.

One might think of landscape as stage, and myth as the actors, but as we know, the environment is not passive. Everything from the weather on the night before D-Day, to the storm that puts out Hero’s beacon to her lover, there is another actor in human affairs – the all-encompassing universe of which we are, even in the art we make.

How well does an artist grapple with, and get down on canvas, the awesome and soul searching all, the infinite in the moment, the very worth and work of our obsessive living and reflection? Art is life’s own advertisement to itself – a broadcast by which we may communicate the deepest things, of which we cannot tire, and that ride with us, even on a painted canvas, homage to the life of life.

January 9, 2008

Here is Hero meets Leander

And Apotheosis (Leander and Hero)

After Apotheosis, the last painting in the show was called Exile, which one viewer thought showed Hero and Leander banished by death from earthly existence. And there is exile in my father's story. I think there is something to this -- the sense of the world as separate from its history. I certainly feel a separation akin to exile since my father died two years ago.

And so, here is Exile

And here is another painting from the show, The overturned Boat

I would like to go on and explain all the background material concerning water, my father, my own experiences, only to show how art funnels many influences into each painting.

The practice of reflection on a show, or a body of work in the studio, is a requisite of the artist's journey. I have demonstrated part of that here, and showed that even in a relatively small show of ten works done in six months there are loose threads, ideas for other ideas. And how to gather these matters together for the eyes, by narrative painting?. . . by landscape. . . ? remains a question, too.

Art itself is a struggle for the proper means, for a means commensurate with ends. How and what attempt to become one. The artist cannot be satisfied until he finds a way to achieve that.

The fallibility of perception

2008-02-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

Horizon Event, one of the paintings in my show at Fleisher

This is a response to Richard Di Dio's post on fractalog, art and the event horizon effect.

Richard, thanks for the interesting reflections about horizons. While I was familiar with the concept of an event horizon, I hadn't heard of horizon effect, but then I haven't been reading your blog that long. I'm sure it will all come into view with further study.

What I had been referring to, on one level, was the relativity of perception. Becoming an artist, and teaching art, has made me very aware of the process of perception.

Art students often see what they think, instead of what they see, just as a novice actor will editorialize instead of act. But that is just part of a more interesting phenomenon.

In Horizon Event I was trying to show how the eye sees near and far in a slightly paradoxical manner. Only a considerable swelling of the sea on the lefthand side of the painting could explain the proximity of that sharp edge, whereas the softer edge on the right side appears farther away.

The eye reads reality in both a summary fashion, which is quick and based on samples and assumptions, and in a detailed fashion, which is localized to the small central focus of our vision.
Artists like De Chirico and Giacometti recommended the primacy of illusion in art, but not a simple trompe l'oil illusion which only results in a literal account of nature. The reason for illusion in painting resides in one of the things photography doesn't provide -- the experience of volumetric space -- and in its ability to create an entire world as a coherent sensation (much as music creates an aural world of coherent sensation entirely new in the world).

With students, I often refer to the inner experience of perception as the dreamspace. It is on that stage that the mind's eye operates, and the physics of the real eye has to collaborate with the conceptions of vision that we learn, or which are native to its organization. I differentiate between these last two, because it seems clear that some of our visual cues may be learned, others may be hard-wired.

For instance, the interpretation of hard and soft edges by the eye can deny or allow space between an object and its background. It also, based on the degree of contrast or color difference, can make one area of a painting precede another in our timeline of noticing. A painting is read according to a hierarchy of "what stands out," and that is indirectly related to how near or far we estimate an object to be. Our evolutionary experience may have selected us, based on whether we noticed the lion or tiger in the grass. And the evolution of the lion and tiger was to become less and less noticed in the same grass. I am not talking here about whether early hominids needed glasses. You can have acute vision, but not notice cues. We learn cues for our survival. For instance, for many years drivers became skilled at navigating by turnpike signage (which is still cued to help us). But all of us know how it feels to not have noticed a sign, because we were talking. Talking, it turns out, is almost impossible while drawing or painting. You would think we would have been an inchoate species, but obviously communication between people is more beneficial than reading highway signs.

"What where," Samuel Beckett might ask, and that is the crux of our dilemma, not only as artists, audiences, and physicists, but also political species, and mere deciders. It is why the ancient Greeks considered tragedy such a good explanation of the perils of judgment. It was not only judgment, however, that was imperfect, it was perception.

We remember how many tragedies begin with an oracle that can be read in two ways. The ambiguity of perception here lies in the "I thought it was like this coin with two sides." In a way, it showed that the ancient world considered itself subject to the ambiguity of conceptual views. I don't think perception, per se, was understood as one source of the dilemma, although Oedipus certainly suffered from a horizon effect, created by his parents, who, of course, were trying to escape the fate of an oracle. In other words, what Oedipus didn't know was as important to the story as what he did know, and the lifting of that veil represents a basic, if classical, view of perception. In other words, perception is trusted as unequivocal evidence, in combination with memory, the perception of others, their memory, and truth telling. (Say, if Tiresias lies, or can't remember, the case doesn't come to a close.) There is much of our modern idea of justice in this conception, but we know modern justice is hobbled by simple problems of perception. Eye witnesses are not reliable, especially when identifying strangers seen only once.

In our day there is much talk about a universe that seems not massive enough to hold together. We have devised a concept (without direct perception) of dark matter, and with the assistance of Einstein's equation about matter and energy, enlarged the concept to include dark energy.

I suggest these are convenient myths based on human problems, not on physics. For instance, in the same ancient world of Greek tragedy, people were easily convinced by Ptolemy and other astronomers that the planets in our sky behave like wandering stars. On a dry level that is an irrefutable description, although we know now they are not stars; but they do seem to wander. But how do they wander? They wander in a very pictorial way, familiar to civilized people of that time -- they follow a path, and now and then they double back before proceding again, as if they had dropped something, or were pausing to talk with another "planet." Well, this is a manner of conceptual vision, based on the familiar life of people. Meteors, by the way, were called "messengers," to reflect their similarity in the scene to runners carrying letters -- a form later repeated by the pony express.

I don't know why this comment should venture so far afield, but I think you can see where I am heading by now. Since physics is lead by people generally associated with a superpower center of civilization (the United States, the European Union, the Soviet Union in its day), they like to think big. You say "no, no," but big is favored as an estimation of the universe.

Given a perception that the universe seems too large, wouldn't objectivity suggest it is in fact smaller? Is it logical to invent another unseen universe that is "dark," has "dark energy," seems threatening somehow?

Perhaps the concept of dark matter, which has grown into an almost engulfing notion of otherness in our concept of the universe, is a sort of projection of dangers people feel on earth, and need to express in some way.

The possibility exists that science can be a form of mythology, even though its history suggests it leads away from that. And yet, there is Ptolemy, as well as Lamarck, as well as Newton, who thought the universe was like a large room that stands still on the rock of God. You can see that some caution should be excercised, especially when something appears too pictorial, or seems too welcome as a metaphor.

There may be something wrong with the distance estimates to the Magellanic clouds, or with the intervening space between us and the Andromeda Galaxy M 31. Perhaps the local atmosphere of the Milky Way (another, bovine, concept) gives one distance to the cepheid variable stars nearby, and another, out-of-scale one, to distant galaxies. So much of our perception of size of the universe is built up on one or two experiments of astronomical perception, which may themselves be flawed.

And then, is it not possible that the gravity effect of the universe as a whole bends or slows light down enough to make the universe appear larger than it is? When you think the glass is only half full, do you fill it with imaginary water? When you look in a convex mirror, do you think the room is actually much larger, and bent like a bowl?

Perhaps we need to realize that we are first of all attempting to perceive with difficult instruments difficult distances through an unknown medium. If scientists could study art as part of their curriculum, they would come to know the fallibilities and operations of perception, even their everyday perceptions, done by eye, of a world they can walk through and confirm, but which they really only assume to know.

Long before judgment, long before "why" is uttered, there is the simple fallibility of perception.

February 1, 2008

My current art show at Fleisher

2008-01-31T10:49:00.000-08:00

Here I am in front of two paintings -- Horizon Event on the left, and Hero Meets Leander on the right.

The show is called Myth and Landscape, and it runs until February 9, 2008, at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine Street, Philadelphia, PA. The gallery is on the second floor. For hours and directions you can call 215-922-3456

Here's a photo taken at the opening. On the left is Allison Whittenberg, and on the right is Barbara Torode, two Philadelphia poets.

Here is my wife, the painter Lynne Campbell, at my show.

Both my and my wife's art can be viewed at tothestudio.com

The Art of Michael Carr

2008-01-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

Sunday, November 11, 2007 Saw the Absolutely Abstract 2007 show at The Philadelphia Sketch Club, where Don Brewer won first prize for his photograph of a concrete sidewalk/patio. Bill Scott and Barbara Zucker juried. While Bill Scott is an abstract artist, Barbara Zucker paints landscapes. Each of the artists picked 50 pieces separately, and Don’s was the one and only overlap.

Mike Carr explained his beautiful piece, vertical, green, clean. It looks like the new Comcast building, but is divided into a frequency, like waves coming to shore, as seen from an airplane. It is about some giant wave in Fiji that kills surfers, or did, until surfboard technology caught up to it somehow. The wave in question has an explosive forward blow that knocks surfers over. Here the new surfboard is an orange rectangle dipped deep into the painting. In little squares at the top there is a gray and white sampling of storm clouds, and squares sampling shore buildings. It is symbolic, sculptural neo-cubism, related closely to hip-hop or Dj inspired sampling, as well as to Pop Romanticism of life in the new age, as well as a kind of futurism – one which displays a faith in the minimal yet colored architecture we are beginning to see in the city.

He seems to be saying that an activity like surfing, or an experience like hearing the radio at the beach (the beach radio painting of a couple years ago) is as constructed and mighty a purpose as the tallest building built. This indicates how buildings are an outgrowth of some primal life-force all human activity shares in, or originates, and not something lowered into our midst that makes everyday recreations and reveries less important. He takes the large for something large-living in us. And he is the template of all these celebrations he shows us. Like a writer writing what he knows, he shows us a painter painting what he knows and how deeply he knows it is present and of its time. He shows how the human spirit – which he has in abundance – creates all the manifestations of these times. He elevates what most would regard as the lesser epics of life (an hour, six hours, of surfing) to the status and statues of, corporate and civic life. No one else has this civilization so clearly marked out in its best terms, nor so well understood as an almost Mediterranean ideal, although here the civilizing sea is either the Atlantic or Pacific. Shouldn’t this work come to be understood and appreciated quickly in California and the islands of Hawaii? No less so right here.