From “Four Essays”

Essay1. Some thoughts on perception, modal thought and drawing

(Early in the essay below I refer to the discovery of a sort of limit to perception that consists of 5 to 7 things. We have conducted experiments in the past, as have scientists before us, that demonstrate the eyes can only recognize or count 5 to 7 objects at a glance.)

When I was a student at the Academy, a friend who would later be best man at my wedding gave me a New York Times article about a study Oliver Sacks had done of an artist who had suffered a minor concussion from a bicycle accident. The patient had showed up complaining of a loss of his sense of color vision. The world to him was now a matter of light and dark, a black and white photograph of gray tones. 

Studying one individual with a brain-accident induced malady is pretty much the early history of neurology. In this instance, the injury to this painter’s brain revealed a very interesting and fascinating pathway artists and viewers of the world use. 

Apparently, the rods, which are light/dark receptors in our retinas send information to our brain separately from the information our color sensitive cones do. Not only that, but the black and white receptors (the rods) send their information in first. Whether the circuit length is shorter and thus requires a briefer moment to travel, or whether color detection itself is slower, I don’t know. But the effect in the brain, which we experience as an instantaneous duality of values as well as color is actually layered in time. The black and white version draws a picture, which the color sensitive cones then fill in, almost like a coloring book picture. 

While this has little to teach us about making art, it does explain why we can both comprehend and independently enjoy things like black and white photography, or non-polychromed sculpture. And it also explains why artists have long ago separated drawing from color, building the drawing first in order to cover that with paint of appropriate color. Many of you may have heard of glazing, or grisaille underpainting, which is then layered with thin washes of color. There has been a natural division of labor sponsored by this branching set of visual data that comes from our eyes. 

It wasn’t until the Impressionists stepped outdoors into the sunlight that painting took on the sudden all-at-once nature we and children both know about. Color itself changes as it turns in the separate colors of daylight, here reflecting a bluer version of itself and there a more yellow version. By this means an alert observer can record the changing color field before her and realize — without resorting to value — a picture of form and space. Now, we would be foolish not to include some value differences as well, because for one thing, our paint colors don’t all come with identical values. The blues are often dark, and yellow is brilliant. Of course, to some degree, that also reflects the value ratio between the blue sky and brilliant sunlight. 

You will also notice something interesting  when you are out at night. Perhaps you remember this as the pageant of nature when you watched a sunset in summer and went on sipping wine into the night. What happened in that interval besides bliss? You will remember that the color receptivity of your eyes went from a stunning maximum during sunset, to an almost black and white monochrome of dark blues and greens. Is color simply a weaker signal in physics, or do our eyes not detect it as well as light and dark? 

Cameras devoted to study this use films and filters to study particular regions of the spectrum. These tell us that of all the radiating signals and reflections in the universe, we “see” a very small section of the entire spectrum. The part we see is spread out in rainbows, which you will be happy to know were not understood by Aristotle. But because he described the colors he saw in rainbows so oddly, we might conclude that he may have been color blind. And not only he, but Homer, the Greek poet of the Illiad and Odessey, may have not seen the color of the sky. I only have the evidence of a linguist for this last opinion of Homer, because blue has no name in those works, suggesting the color was unknown to its author. We do know that Homer was aware of a form of blindness brought on by stress — almost a form of visual amnesia. So there may indeed be some special reason Homer knew something might be wrong with his own vision, but that is only a half-hearted suggestion. Cases of battle blindness have been observed throughout history. But let us not dwell long on this. 

I want to return attention to the notion of modal thought. Oliver Sacks postulates a model of the brain that is separated into modes of thought. You might consider this the question of what does the mind do in the brain? We all have this ability to enjoy black and white drawing, apart from color, so those two modes can be enjoyed separately or together. But what about sound and drawing? While we are busy with a spatial task such as drawing or painting, the ambient sounds around us easily fade into silence. A radio seems no longer to be on, and time ironically both slows down and speeds up. If a phone rings, we wake up, but for much of our work the mode of thought that absorbs our attention is on the task at hand. 

That tells us something important about how we are thinking. The right brain is too strict an idea of the brain’s organization, but in a loose way it gathers the notion of modal thought into a label we can use. 

I want to address the notion many of us have had that drawing the way we have been is somehow linked to our subconscious mind. I have an appreciation of what we seem to mean by that term subconscious, but I would like you to know that visual thought is not subconscious. It is actually equally conscious to our word-ear mode of thought, and often more adroit and faster to process things. 

As one example of what I mean, I quote a footnote in Oliver Sacks’s memoir concerning an experiment on thought and brain. The details of the study do not matter as much to this discussion as the record of timing and motive. Here is the quote:

“It was at Mount Zion that Libet performed his astounding experiments showing that if subjects were asked to make a fist or to perform another voluntary action, their brains would register a ‘decision’ nearly half a second before there was any conscious decision to act. While his subjects felt that they had consciously and of their own free will made a movement, their brains had made a decision, seemingly, long before they did.”

If you relate this evidence to how unusually random you think you were as you drew, and then how you felt you were getting to something, and then how you pulled up and stopped, you will realize that something more deliberate than vague unconsciousness may well have been guiding you. Because this exercise in drawing is made to baffle the left brain sense of let’s-go-slow-like-a-sentence-goes, we also attempted and usually achieved a global view of the drawing space — that all-at-once notice of everything there. 

So here is what we have been proposing: that there is a discreet number of things we can see in one glance (5-7), on which the notion of composition must rest. That there are only a few basic compositions used in human history, and that visual art, right from its expression of composition has gotten the age it is in just right. 

When Jackson Pollock paints all over, he is painting one object made of many parts. That unity (a formal art term we will discuss) is the one thing we notice at first. Remember that even though composition can rest on as many as 5 to 7 elements, it doesn’t have to. Anything less than 5 is all the better. Photographers among you may have heard of the rule of three in composition. When you take in a view from the beach, it is easy to see how the world naturally arranged itself into the rule of three: the beach, the water, the sky. But wait, here come two people crossing the view and another in the water. We now have 3+2+1, or, if you view them as a couple, 3+1+1. In either case, we are still within the compositional framework of 5 to 7. Now you might say to me, there are 14 people in the water. At that point we consider it a crowd, which in the glance of things we again categorize as 1. 

Of course, we love to walk up to paintings and study them in isolated vignettes. There your crowd dissolves into a constellation of figures, and they must compose themselves in ways we find appropriate to what we intend. 

So we have established some matters of perception that are always with us, and the notion of self-isolating modes of thought that assist us in focus and special creative tasks. But what about the higher reasons for art? What of this knowledge will ever create the overwhelming response in our audience we should rightly want to achieve? Haven’t we all been moved, especially when quite young, by art? And why is it that otherwise sane people can be heard crying and weeping during part of an opera? What is all this about? And is emotion like that not due to thought? Yet, who is thinking? And what is the empathy that makes such experience in the face of art possible?

I will leave this for you to wonder about. If you have theories, and I know some of you  must, don’t hesitate to send them to us. We will be returning to this discussion further on in the course, even if silence prevails right now. 

And please send me your projects, in drawing, or painting, as you are emboldened to trust your visual mind, and the speed at which it thinks. I look forward to everything you do. 

All the best,

John Sevcik 

John Sevcik Talks about Art, Paint and History

John Sevcik talks about art, paint and history to afternoon Painting Studio class, 9-18-13, at Fleisher.

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 made his fortune in the real estate of building the largest movie house chain ever. He saw the movies early in their history, and he believed in movies. So he became a movie house mogul. There is a direct connection between his love of movies, and his love of Rodin, in my opinion.  

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 19^th 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 19^th 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, the world is tense with something new. And art gets it right away.

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

The Naked and the Nude

“No man in my country has seen a woman naked and painted her as if he knew anything except that she was naked. No woman in my country is naked except at night.”

                       – William Carlos Williams, in the essay A Matisse

 

“In the french sun, on the french grass in a room on Fifth Avenue a french girl lies and smiles at the sun without seeing us.” So concludes Williams after looking at a Matisse on a 5^th Avenue wall in New York.

The  poet is not alone in noticing a peculiar difference between American versions of the nude and the continental traditions we have come from. We speak of the figure, as if something about the human being were mechanical and cast-like.

The Matisse that occupies Williams’s attention shows the result of an afternoon Matisse spent outdoors with a model who accepts the artist’s gaze with the same equanimity as she does the rays of the sun. France calls her a nude.

I can think of a few nudes in French art that meet our gaze – Olympia by Manet; that Ingres with the long torso looking over her shoulder at the viewer – but the lack of self-consciousness is indeed the difference, and why wouldn’t it?

When the Platonist sees the figure, it is the human soul. When the Puritan sees the figure he sees sin, guilt and judgment. And when we paint the figure, we are less able to appreciate human goodness, because our belief in things has continued as a backwater reaction against humanism.

You might well say, what of the 20^th century? Where did humanism get it right in Europe? It was Puritan and Protestant America that had to come to the rescue and end the carnage of those wars with more carnage of the figure, the figure of mankind.

Although we somehow know the human body is beautiful, because it is an essential aesthetic anyone can appreciate, the sadness is that the beauty of us is not a sufficient defense from harm or war. Alone, this fact is astonishing, often to doctors more than artists.

While I long had an aversion to Philip Pearlstein’s paintings, even to the way they were made in cells, as in a sort of prison, I have been changed by what they struggle to show me. While close to the French model in Williams’ Matisse painting, Pearlstein’s models do not smile at the sun, nor even gaze; instead they wait until their time is up.

This doomed prison of time, of being observed, reminds me so much of Norman Mailer’s Pacific War novel “The Naked and the Dead.” But the dead who were really on our minds after the war were the dead in the concentration camps. To me Pearlstein is heroically rescuing body after body from time, from death, and there is no French sun, no sun at all, just the passing of time as at a resurrection or a wake.

It is the work of art to manage all that lies beyond words, the heavy truth, or the joy transcendent of life.

What nude appears in Eric Fischl’s paintings? Again the wrestling with our Puritan demons. He is either saying “Life includes this; accept yourself in this. All that is human is good.” Or he is saying “You are disturbed by your consciousness of the human experience.” Now what?

You cannot say the honesty of art in America is wrong. On the contrary, we are perhaps uncovering more than what clothes hide. We are studying the human being in its self-conscious truth. Perhaps an uncluttered, uncomplicated enjoyment of sunlight is less taxing on our eyes. But the humanism we seek is one that must defend mankind by revealing to the utmost who we are in our own blessing.

Chivalry, invented in Provence by the French, may have been created by men for women, or by both for both. It is possible that chivalry alone conferred the trust French models show Matisse, and he by that design is trustworthy. He likened his relationship to his adored models as a love, one in which they shower flower petals on each other. There is both a sensual admission to that metaphor and a chaste regard – a charm – which we have heard about and found difficult to master.

But mastery is possibly the problem. It was a dream of the 19^th century to establish human will as the spine of mastery. Again, the 20^th century saw the fall of supermen and mighty wills. Coincidentally, almost in opposition to this trend, artists painted more loosely, found fresh paradigms, were exiled for not being salon masters. To accommodate them – and Matisse is a prime example – we loosen the definition of master. Now we mean not will, but discovery; not the old done better, but creation from the intuition; not contests, but contributions; not the artist’s ego, but the charm of the subject.

We have given ourselves over to this study of our times through art, not because artists lead us, but because art and we lead them. They are, after all, made of us, in our situation in time.

To think back to medieval painting and our early tradition of the figure/ground relationship, we understand it as a formal problem – yes. But it is also a matter of feudal importance. Land and the person on it – who is bound to it by fate, history, fealty, narrative, loyalty, economics – is an essential feature.

In neoclassical France, the figure/ground relationship follows a different tack. Where the Middle Ages once burst the confines of feudal obligation by the appearance of miracles, modernizing France places dreams of past glory against the ground of time. The anachronism of Socrates is declared lifted and the past is here to help as a form of Academy in humanism, philosophy and the arts.

And between these Ages, Neo-Platonism perfects the Italian Renaissance by replacing the clothed figure with the nude. This, then, is the most natural state, unadorned with the diamonds and gowns that make bachelorettes squeal with material glee on our television flat screens.

The figure/ground debate in America shifts from even these trappings. Olympia, a prostitute shown regally luxurious by Manet, is followed in America by a scrutiny of Balthus for evidence of child sexual abuse.

In fact, the matters of our last 20 years in America are nowhere found more aptly than in the portraits of Anne Harris, which answer the sarcasm and ironies of John Currin’s vision. These paintings by Harris are paintings for our time, mostly of women, and girls, by a woman artist. Here then is the long awaited move – a humane face for the question of what we mean to ourselves. The figure/ground relationship is almost non-existent in the traditional sense. What we notice is the figure’s psyche – the consciousness looking out with some unease about herself, about us, about her fate in being contained in the body. They are spiritual, if you like that term; they are of the school of the naked. They are true as the naked is true, and they are still seeking to be understood, as our human sisters, as what we are, as how we live bewildered, wry, alone,  although horribly public.

Indeed, it may be art that one day makes us incapable of war, incapable of not understanding one another. This is the process begun long ago, the process of art and artist seeking to understand more than anatomy, more than the naked or the nude.

John Sevcik

Eileen Goodman, Lauren Garvey and Aubrey Levinthal at Gross McCleaf Gallery

 

Aubrey Levinthal, Foggy Table, oil on panel, 16 x 16

 

We went to see Lauren Garvey, Aubrey Levinthal, and Eileen Goodman’s openings at Gross McCleaf. Levinthal is like the Bonnard of Philadelphia; her transparent paints and reliance on bright, visionary underpainting that gleams uncovered  gives these still lifes a euphoria and splendor.

 

Lauren Garvey’s abstract paintings make a more introspective impression – mysterious, lower chroma meditations that leave charm behind for something interrogative. They are deeper than Jasper Johns’ abstract painting, but share his confrontational nature, as if to say “what’s this” of something the viewer can come to know, but not understand.

 

Eileen Goodman’s realist watercolors display the abstract organization of objects prepared for painting. The added element is done for color and because it can be included. They then have a relationship akin to the crowd and a showy outsider. The tone, however, is somber, making these outsiders conscious and tragic as an Ayn Rand heroine (if there is such a thing; if not, there should be).

 

Gross McCleaf Gallery

127 S Sixteenth Street

Philadelphia, PA 19102

Oct. 2 – 26, 2013





Empathy, Religion and the Other: the art of Henry Ossawa Tanner

The show of Henry Ossawa Tanner currently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is focused more on his religious paintings, and almost not at all on his paintings of Black American genre subjects. Of these, the most famous is the painting “The Banjo Lesson,” which was shown during the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 1990-91 show of the artist’s work.

Alas, there are only a few of those American genre paintings, for when Tanner left the U.S. for France, he became a painter of religious paintings, and intriguingly, the life of the Muslim quarter in Palestine. In Paris and his retreat north of there in Etaples, he notices the religious life of Christianity in the town square; he pictures fishing as fraught with religious symbolism and metaphor; he paints the supernatural glow of a cool redemptive light that usually visits a humanized world of warmth. Even his early quick portrait of his father Benjamin Tanner, a Bishop in the A.M.E. church, already shows a cool turquoise blue crucifix resting on the breast of the bishop in an otherwise warmly lit ambiance.

The humanism of religious people is part of this work’s power, but there are other aspects and ways to its unfolding. The empathy with the other by which he tells the tale of redemption is exemplary. Christ for him is a wonderfully magician-like, mesmeric, tall individual. He is indeed a miracle worker, and his disciples are shown in two different responses to Christ in the painting “The Pilgrims of Emmaus:" the wonder-filled face of astonishment, and the purpose-filled seriousness of deep conviction. Neither of these two understands the mysterious figure seated before them. The grapes on the table tell the proverb of their struggle, their wisdom to come, even their martyrdom. They have yet to endure much in order to understand and imitate the magician of metaphysics.

There is inherent in Tanner’s view the appearance of the other as a mystery and private fact of life. Women are, in these paintings, the real religious figures of divinity, deep understanding, and human empathy. The woman standing behind the disciples in “The Pilgrims of Emmaus” seems un-needful of redemption. The mother teaching her son in “Christ and His Mother Studying the Scriptures” seems a true source of love and wonder. The mother in “Mary” looking down at her infant, or off into the light that visits the manger in “Holy Family,” or into the tomb abandoned by the risen Christ on Easter in “The Three Marys,” each seems fully human, fully realized, and without any needs of zealotry or theological conviction.

There is so much to notice about this record of human thought, how it actually differs in the sexes as they struggle to understand, or do something about, the fate of living and dying. In the great painting “Return from the Crucifixion,” the stragglers – mostly women – trudge from the scene of the three crosses, over a precipitous landscape of three different lights. The one they tread toward us is a gnarled and knotted hill of despondent grief, the middle one a landscape of dried streambeds searching their lost ways toward nowhere, but the far bluffs catch the promise of day’s last light under a warm blue sky. How has the story of what we are left with after the execution of Christ ever been better portrayed?

As to the great painting of “The Resurrection of Lazarus,” I must first applaud it along all these lines mentioned above. Every figure in this painting is perfectly drawn and painted to show a story of human emotion, thought, experience, concern. The light of day coming from the cave entrance is strangely cold and filled with the blaze of justice and divine truth – a truth of power and miracles, but not easy sympathies or understandings. The light in the crowd, the light of Christ and Lazarus and the human scene at the grave is warm and sympathetic. All eyes are turned in fear, or hope, or grief to the missed loved one, and he – does he actually awaken in this painting, sitting propped up in his grave as if tiredly making his way back into life? Or is he actually succumbing to death in the presence of his family? Isn’t this what this great painting is actually about? Not the act of rising, but of dying? And in this moment of mortal passage, what isn’t miraculous about the presence of love, a love that rises even from the grave to live eternally? This, the soul of the person, this tender Lazarus, his hand falling in weakness to its knuckles by his side, this man so unlike a disciple, so uninterested in the miracle itself, only gently conveyed to the pity of us and Christ for our consideration and love – this is our most successful meeting with the other. For these are not people like us in any other way than their humanity. Their dress is different, their living arrangements are different, their climate is different, their hair is different, and yet we love them and understand them.

Sermons in words can only get us to think of these things. Paintings like these make us feel the truth for which sermons are written. There is no difference between a miracle and a painting, and when we were children and felt these things were true about paintings, we knew a truth before we were ever taught why it is true.

And so we come to this art to know that the human being is a miracle in a miraculous place; the place of those exquisite nocturnal skies, as the one in “Christ and His Disciples on the Road to Bethany” that Tanner spreads out in their infinity, yet close to the playing out of our dramas and concerns. It is both sincere and modern, this view that seems to be about religion, but is actually about inclusion, and scrutiny, and the reckoning with strange powers, and the overarching family of our large and enduring human love, our world-wide community.

John Sevcik

Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit
at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Broad and Cherry Streets,
Philadelphia, PA

Show continues until April 15, 2012

Remembering Martha’s Vineyard and Wade Johnson

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. His is a 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