John Sevcik talks about art, paint and history to afternoon Painting Studio class,
Present: Peter Chance,
Ebony Collier, Julie Garrard, Monsceratte Fischer, eventually Bruce Segal, and
Wendy Rush
I would like to begin by singing the praises of Rodin, whose
museum I went to on my birthday to re-evaluate what I had long felt. There had
been some mention in this class last semester, due to an interview of Kirk Varnedoe by Charlie Rose, that
Rodin was only a sculptor for adolescent
boys, and that now we were on to art about nothing. Rodin is about life, and
many things besides romance. He is a compendium of humanity. Maybe heaven and
hell are over for most people here, maybe pride is no longer practiced, maybe
the great subjects of art are passé.
Even though you are painters, I am thinking of leading you
over there sometime this semester to look at art that is about the human being,
in human terms, by a great artist. What he does is like the movies at their
greatest – he shows the human being in terms we can understand. And the movies
learned all of this from sculptors like Rodin, and painters, who pre-envisioned
scenes based on stories from the Bible and later scenes from fiction.
It is little surprise to me that the collector (Jules Mastbaum)
who gave us our Rodin Museum
Rodin is rightly judged the first sculptor since
Michelangelo to reach so high. If I don’t take you, at least go yourselves. Go
look at the sculpture of John the Baptist, at how his one eye is suspiciously
looking sideways, frightened of what people think of him, and how the other eye
gazes forward with the sureness of blind infinity, faith-filled. And then walk
around behind the sculpture and see the weak, suspicious, frightened shoulder, versus the powerful shoulder of faith.
Rodin can demonstrate in the walk, in the manner, the split personality both of
faith and doubt, crazy certitude and paranoid fear. It is a maquette for our
time, considering what continues to go on in the name of religion.
Rodin is wrongly criticized. When he made “The Age of
Bronze”, which stands outside in a niche of the wall, people – critics –
declared it cast from life. My own teacher Lou Sloan at the Academy still told
that story about the Academy’s original plaster cast of the clay model – that
it was simply realistic, a life cast, and that was why no one liked it. There
was no emphasis, no exaggeration. These are important questions about art, too,
but the libel was continuing a century after it was started. And by a very nice
man. Lou Sloan was one of the kindest of the instructors at the Academy.
But we are here to study painting.
The history of paint helps explain why we are here, and the
nature of paint is available to us in all the old ways, as well as the modern
one of direct painting. Remember that the large brush is the one to start with,
even a rag or paper towel.
The application of paint to a surface by human motion is
similar, yet unlike, other natural forces at work that weather stone, erode landscape,
or build granite. If you’ve gone to the New England
coast and seen granite, you will appreciate how colors – but no, you don’t have
to go to New England . Everyone has a granite counter top
now and you can see a polished cross section of pattern made by the actions of
earth’s natural forces.
If you’ve walked along the beach near the surf, you may have
noticed the line of spume where each wave ends to draw a beautiful varying arc
which supplants, or joins, or is rewritten by a following wave; and that line
seems organic and varies with beautiful sensitivity.
Now paint has a history in the hands of people, who first
picked it up as dirt (iron oxide) and charcoal, and chalk, to draw in caves
their memories of the world outside. Later, paint used a binder of egg yolks
and made medieval paintings that are like modern acrylic paint, which was
developed originally as a modern tempera paint – flat, matte, not built up in
impasto. Then oil paint was discovered, which was used to glaze the egg tempera
with filtering colors, achieving brilliance and control via transparency. Lapis
Lazuli, a semi-precious stone, was one of the pigments milled down to create
such glazes, and it was and is an expensive though permanent paint to this day.
Then oil paint succeeded in taking over on its own, and by a
hundred years ago was almost modern as we know it. We now have opaque and
transparent paints which were already used alternately in the same painting by
Titian, during the late Renaissance.
What are transparent and opaque paints? Well, if you look
down at the studio floor you will see many effects we use, even the old dirt
and varnish in areas which imitate old paintings with darkened varnish. Edvard
Munch, by the way, was not loath to admit that his own paintings were finished
by the Norweigian weather in winter. His studio had no ceiling, no roof – it
was like an open pen. People burned wood in wood burning stoves all winter
there, the snow would fall through the smoke and carry soot onto the face up
paintings and glaze them with a unifying shade of carbon.
Soot is much finer than the charcoal you use to draw, your
vine charcoal. And we now know why, thanks to science, thanks to physics. We
have long known carbon atoms make strong cages, crystals, like this (using fingers
of hand), which are very hard and don’t smudge, break, or come loose. The
carbon atoms are far apart and light goes through the crystal for reasons I and
engaged couples don’t understand but wonder at.
Carbon atoms in sheets create graphite, which slides off and
looks nice to draw and write with.
But charcoal and soot are related in this way: they are
different sized balls of carbon atoms like graphite sheets rolled into spheres,
and depending on how many carbon atoms per sphere you get varying sorts and
softnesses of carbon for drawing. (By the way, the compressed charcoal I don’t
recommend you use is made of soot and binder, and because the particles are so
small, you cannot erase them out of your paper.)
Soot of very fine particles can be easily harvested from a
wood burning stove flue, which I’ve done, and which is why I identify it as
Munch’s preferred final layer. When you watch – they don’t exist anymore – a
smoker with a cigarette, holding it like fashion, the smoke rising in a slender
column, and then it twirls at the end? That’s the carbon atoms joining together
into soot and conserving their angular momentum like an ice dancer who pulls in
her arms to speed up the spin. You are seeing an effect of atomic motion,
molecular motion, before your eyes, as you compromise your lungs with second
hand cigarette smoke: more dangerous, by the way, than first hand cigarette
smoke, because fluorescent lights make it radioactive. Really.
So is painting part of science? Is it only physics? Is
drawing technology? And isn’t the mind and body of an artist made of atoms and
molecules and their relationships to each other and those of the universe, its
infinity and fate? Munch, in his open air studio, harnessed a natural event to
add that believability old varnish often hid paintings in. If vague enough, the
imagination of the viewer’s eye often improves a painting, or believes more
fully what it thinks it sees in the paint.
Munch is the painter of – famously – The Scream, which is a
perfect summation of Europe at the time: a place rife
with neurosis and the discovery and naming of it. Why were women especially
thought neurotically mysterious? Well, they may have wanted more say, the vote,
independence, education, their own money . . . yet, Nietzsche couldn’t imagine any of that – it was an
open, unsolvable question cried out by tragic, clueless men in the dark
(probably alone), “What do women want!?”
According to Freud they wanted sex, or a penis. To Jung they
wanted an archetype to go with the patriarchy he didn’t notice. To Ibsen, Nora
leaves home and shatters marriage and the 19th century. Munch, too,
can’t figure out what is happening, and finally, not asking women’s advice, the
men of the world convene two world wars and finally let women vote, though they
still don’t hold many offices.
Now paint – the way you paint – is controlled by the times
you live in. Even if you could not make sense of oppressed women in the 19th
century, you could start feeling nervous, paint mermaids and Lorelei preying on
single men, depict Nora shattering the Civil order by walking out of the home
and the role of wife.
When Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner – very intelligent
people – appear in 1950, right after the bomb has obliterated two cities of
people in Japan
This floor shows the action of painters dropping paint,
cleaning up. Here is a series of opaque white blobs, here the action of falling
paint. Here someone wiped paint off – it was white and still shows through,
leaving a graying ghost through which we also see the fogged over floor below –
this is like a scumble. A glaze is a scumble that is transparent. A scumble is
a glaze that’s semi-opaque, like this fog. (This is not technically true, but I
say it to alleviate the fear and love people have for the lost art of glazing.
I want you to understand these are thin layers of paint, first and foremost.
How to achieve them is much easier, once you have demystified their existence.)
You look here and you see artists have left a series of
marks, mark making. Unconscious? Intentional? Well, let’s notice this light
green smear – like a cat’s face and body, twisting in space. The soft edges let
you imagine it. Is it intentional? Is it in the science of dropping paint that
falls at a speed and then gets wiped by some more conscientious student? Or is
it the technology of intent?
Just a sidebar – science is complex – the all. Technology is
a small part used . . . we’re not sure, yet: maybe wisely, maybe not.
I contend that just as remarks slip from our brain through
words, cats appear from our towels, and brushes find faces and figures, or the
universe in its atomic furies, or a landscape of the mind at that instant. It
is as conversational, or at least as conversant, as I am with you, talking.
So even though I set up a still life here, I am more and
more interested in the Rorschach of your time. Begin with paint, and let paint
show you what you see, feel and think. It seems to always work, if you let it.
When I demonstrate a scribble drawing for my Thursday class,
something from the last 24 hours almost always comes up. It may be the child
alone on a sidewalk I noticed with worry while I was driving to class once, and
then finding her reunited, though drifting from her parents, in my drawing
demo.
The Rorschach of our time can be the scribble drawing a
student of mine made as one of her first scribble drawings in my class; it displayed
an animal auction that I recognized immediately as taking place at the annual Harrisburgh
farm show, which was indeed where she saw that happen, in exactly the arena I
remembered from her drawing.
It is like the cumulus clouds you saw in summer when you
were young and had time, and how they are creatures or people, a rabbit, a person,
a horse, a dragon, doing and changing into something else – all due to the
activity of your imagination, and the true hints of form above you.
It is in paint itself that you can divine the time you live
in and show each other all that matters.
Remember, however, that the truth may not be welcome in its
time. Poetry magazine refused all
submissions of love poetry. Emily Dickinson couldn’t get published in her
lifetime. Van Gogh was a failure, if you measure it, as he did, by acceptance.
Now – ? We all love
them. They are finally safe . . . and
irrelevant.
The past is past.
The present is yet to be painted.
John
Sevcik