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

Man and Meaning: Dick Ranck, Painter and Sculptor

 

                                                                     Cave Work by Dick Ranck

There is a painting in this show that Dick began by looking at a photograph of the cave paintings in France. The beasts he eliminated, the wall is not discernable, the painting was then rotated to stand on end instead of in landscape orientation. There is what appears to be a golden figure before us, ¾ length, pointing to the left, the hand and lower arm not showing, in the direction of some atmospheric blue paint in the top left corner that we see over the shoulder. This blue mythic field also encompasses the area of the figure’s head, which is dreaming in a shroud of the world outside the cave to which it points, while also looking at us and looking around inside the cave. Myth and mythology are by this sign conjoined, and it is the ennoblement of man that the works of this show attempt to convey: The ennoblement of the riddle solver, who is himself a riddle. Socrates is this man’s first exponent.

In all these visions the task of man is explicitly made large. Wood sculptures emerge from the animate spirit their original yoke or crotch or bend or branching suggest. The modern is as primitively rooted as in ancient times, Ranck suggests. Both terror and tenderness take turns. The myth of fear is as real as the myth of courage. The suggestion in such work is that the real is indeed mythic in its very nature, and not able to be broken down into surface realisms, or the representation of banal exteriors.

There are test models for the Trojan Horse here and there, reminding us of vehicles our cars attempt to duplicate, complete with splitting wooden wheels, and a recalcitrant technology that nature undercuts. This is like the god in the machine, a thing long ago laughed off as a theatre device, but nowadays a more visible result of our courageous stories. Think Industry foiled by Global Warming; the car foiled by rust; the body aging from time’s use.

The work of Gauguin has to come up in looking at these, and you realize that Gauguin was intuiting abstraction in his own way. Dick Ranck paints with less distraction by an exotic region across the Pacific. His wilderness is the woods of Vermont and Maine, his abstraction the sky and what the mind plays out of it, or on it.

In this you have both light and air, some exaggeration of the Id’s wide wishes, the ego’s drive, the toys of children, and the embrace of love.

The generation of tattoos and Red Hot Chili Peppers that thrashed about to wild music during the Super bowl halftime show the evening of the opening are all coincident with these deeper meditations about our wild natures. If not civilization, then Liberty must stem from and be ordered by these ungovernable spirits.

John Sevcik

                     At Richard Rosenfeld Gallery

                              Philadelphia
                              Throughout February 2014

 

The Lense of Vision



Moon photographed in 2012 with a 6-inch Newtonian reflector telescope I built



When I once brought my eye to the eyepiece of a telescope and witnessed the moon, it was not science but wonder that held me transfixed. And this, too, would not be correct, for what I saw was not suspended in hallucination, nor a vacant staring; I was instead enlivened by sensation. Noticing things, specific and concrete, both expanded my wonder and began a list of observations which descend to science and its purposes. But the open-eyed shock of near disbelief – the witness of one’s own miraculous vision – remained for all my life a welcome, if infrequent, occurrence. Art excites it, yet art seems a secondary illustration taken of vision’s prime effect. It is like memory rather than the first instance of seeing.

Oddly, Copley has some of that optical effect in his airless colonial portraits, and Vermeer practically sits us down in a camera obscura. It is more due to optical accuracy that the state of wonder is engendered in us like this, and it is ironic for the hard observational work – the science – needed for such a simple accomplishment on the viewer’s behalf.

So the state of seeing passes through stages – the first being prized for its sensational magic, and succeeding observations resorting to noticings, then measurements, finally a dry correspondence like this, or some account book registration.

Who will reawaken in us this first light of an object’s existence in our consciousness? Who can re-create the poetry of the brand new experience? Or have we forever passed beyond the ability to be thrilled by a movie of an arriving train? Must we now have a story to include it in?

Yet, the train arriving still thrills us in person. No story is necessary. The visceral is enough, yet the more we record it, the less we have of it. When I again have brought my eye to the lense of the telescope, and see there the moon in its finery of gray and satin whites, its bombarded continents and gray dust oceans; when I thereon do gaze languid in my summer comfort, breathing air that is nowhere present on the moon; when I partake of wonder at the stony sphere out there and of myself below drawn up by fascination; then am I at the tip-toe of my life, alive with the wonder of the all in all.

Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries

 

 

                                              The Fourth Cherry Tree, oil on canvas, 65 x 34 in.

 

The 21st Century has arrived, and this is what it consists of -- the imagination and empathy of color. What Cezanne did for the apple, Scott does for the viewer. This is partly due to something Rothko took us through on his own behalf, for his own suffering. But the result of painting after another half century of modernist development has landed in America from a unique and apt shore: the city of Philadelphia.

The difference might be said to be a shift in the last two years from opaque to transluscent paint application. It might be said to be a shift from lower chroma to high chroma paint mixture; but none of this is as important as the unique experience that continues from the former paintings, but blooms into undeniable transport.

This empathy of tender, brave and luminous paint, a shimmer of radiance lighting the mind, is as new as the iphone is to the telephone, yet just as human. What you have before you is a symphony without elegy. Nothing is impossible to imagine in a state of joy like this. There is no ballast, just lift. The eyes are upward, they see for you around corners, they see the sound of the surf in the sky, in a bath, in the reconfigured impressionism of Renoir.

You can't really say impressionism, or realism, leads to this; they lead to each other; or better yet, they stem from the same inner source of the artist's inspiration. That one artist can give us such light is like saying a man can be the helmsman of dawn.

Joy and the ode to joy is all!

In Arcadia
Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries
3 October to 2 November 2013
958 Madison Ave.
New York, New York 10021