Vermillion Ideas

Light Vermillion

 Seville Still-Life, 1910-11. 

Oil on canvas. 

35" x 46."

Henri Matisse

Detail

Matisse painting Seville Still Life in Spain in 1910. Just as Picasso and other Modernists were appropriating influences from Africa, Islam, and Japan, Matisse here found Moorish design as a way of freeing himself from the particulars of realism.  The foreign designs became meat for Modernist ideas. Instead of using values to indicate space, in this canvas Matisse was dedicating himself to the Modernist ethos of the surface and the formal elements, or basic structure, of the picture. Color was his forward element, taking the place of value, and in this way Matisse was a pirate on the open seas of change. 


The surrounding patterns of emerald green with crimson notes control the composition, and the China blue chair cover gives visual movement and compliments the orange design of the central tablecloth. Everything supports the negative spaces of high intensity vermillion red. The celebration of negative space reenforces Matisse's idea of the the picture plane as the main thing. This is the essence of Modernism: innovation. We are not looking at Vasari's type of space; Henri Matisse owns a whole new archetype of picture space.

Compare the earlier still life, Crockery on a Table, which was created just ten years before the Seville work.

Henri Matisse

Crockery on a Table, 1900.

oil on canvas

97 x 82 cm

Matisse is, even in 1900, concerned with design over all else. Here, he has added another length of canvas below the table top to allow the objects to breath in a fully realized space. The extra negative space gives the coffee set an elevated position, and proper importance. 

This essay by artist Paul Corio says much about Matisse's colorist ways:

I've been thinking about Matisse a lot lately, for a number of reasons. I'm teaching a color course with a pattern component right now, and needless to say, it's a good time to revisit with a fresh eye a lot of the pictures that I've seen a million times.

 Without gushing about his mastery, I'll say this: he was a master. Like his friend Bonnard, he could confound figure and ground without painting abstract pictures; using limited value contrasts to mash objects back into the flattened, shallow space, and using pattern to bring the ground almost all the way up to the picture plane. He could also paint people without making pictures about people, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds like - his figures had no particular psychology to explore, they exist on the same plane (literally and figuratively) as the still-life elements, furniture, textiles, and the other objects and spaces in the pictures. Matisse used color as a leveler of those things, and like all great colorists he made it looks easy, which led (and still leads) many to question the scope of his achievement.

 by Paul Corio

Further study:

Matisse: Life and Painting

Matisse at The Colorist

I Ascended Alone

  

Henri Matisse, 1930. Silver gelatin

by Edward Steichen.

Dance, 1910. o/c. 8.5 feet x 12.75 feet. Henri Matisse.

Music, 1910. o/c. 8.5 feet x 12.75 feet. Henri Matisse.

   

    

  Would they be there? The two great canvases, Dance, and Music, are twin titans that Matisse painted for his patron, Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, in 1910. This August, I went to see these works at the State Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. But, I had reason to worry about their whereabouts.


  After a day of touring the great museum with Olga, our Russian guide, I was told the Matisse works had been moved to an outer building of the sprawling complex. Russians didn't prefer the Modernists, anyway, and so they were possibly on exhibit at the General Staff building. I had traveled halfway around the world to see the definitive works by the master Henri Matisse, whose influence on me has grown over the past many years. Would both of the canvases be accessible, or perhaps only one of them?

  Olga had taken our small group on a whirlwind run through the main museum building, the Winter Palace. Look! There's Michelangelo! Da Vinci and Raphael, puff, p-puff! Huh, wheeze. Now look at Rembrandt - there he goes! It was an atrocious art crime; speeding past masterworks by the greatest artists of world history but never actually looking at them! The idea was to say that you had seen Leonardo; you were in his presence. What did the painting look like? Hell if I know! It was too crowded and I was only afforded a second's audience with the great canvas.

Ascending the grand staircase of the General Staff Building of The State Hermitage Museum.

     Had I come all the way to Russia for nothing?

  I ascended alone the wide, white marble stairway inside the General Staff Building of The Hermitage. After some trouble with language and directions, I had found the place where I hoped to view the great man's art. Up a central line of emerald green glass and through glorious four-story doors, there waited a nearly private exhibit of paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse. Yes, they were all there.


  It seem to me that there was something providential happening. Not only did I see both of the big 1910 canvases by Matisse, but I also enjoyed a rare exhibit of about 30 works by the master, including important paintings such as Harmony in Red and Portrait of The Artist's Wife. In this exhibit, I saw his color, his passion, and his carefree attitude in painting. 

"(I paint) to translate my emotions...through color and drawing, which neither the most perfect camera, even in color, nor the cinema, can do." Henri Matisse. 1942 Radio Interview.

Detail: Seville Still Life. Insane Red Color.

  This was a life event for me: a long private conversation (art is communication, isn't it?) with the 20th century French Colorist Henri Matisse. Seeing the works in their context, in close proximity to one another, and in regal situation, was an irreplaceable experience. What more can be said with color in new paintings? I can't wait to see.

Nobody Was Harmed In The Making Of This Artwork

Hanging Tree in Color

@7" x 15"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

How many people consider nostalgia to be the pinnacle of art?  An astounding number in your circle, no doubt, see the number one function of paintings and drawings to be taking them back to a bygone era. The Victorian era, perhaps. Roaring Twenties, anyone? 

Once upon a time, I showed a drawing of a tree that I had just rendered to this man I barely knew. He thought to compliment me by suggesting that there, on the branch, I ought to place a man hanging. That would amp the emotional appeal, I suppose. 

That is precisely what practitioners of fine art are supposed to avoid: the appeal to sympathy or nostalgia. The reason is that it is an attempt to recruit the viewer based on an appeal to his feelings about something. How in Bloody Sunday am I supposed to guess people's feelings? Is it wisest for the artist to take a pole of the relatively specific feelings of the greatest majority of rubes who might wander past his artwork as it hangs, in perpetuity, seeking those whom it will conquer? 

It's a rather progressive approach to marketing art, and altogether wrongheaded for lots of reasons.  The most important reason it is wrong is that contemporary art should be my soapbox - my ideas. Not Aunt Sweeney's, and not Joe Q. Public's sympathies. My ideas are universal enough to appeal and conquer plenty fine, thank you. 

No criminal needs to hang in a tree for the advancement of my art today. Live and let live, I say.  

March 30 is Vincent van Gogh's Birthday

The Vincent & Theo van Gogh Graves

Vincent was denied a church funeral because of his suicide. Those were the days when it was considered a sin. VVG had plenty of that. Sin. His mother wished him dead well before his actual demise, and his father disowned him.

In the list of shared background that I have with VVG, there is the matter that I have my BA in the Bible and theology. One of the things in the van Gogh story that has been bugging me is the art critics who write the histories of the old boy have him renouncing his Christian faith. I find no evidence of that. Yes, he most definitely strayed "off the reservation", and had unkind things to say about the church. He cohabits with, and consorts with, prostitutes. Then again, Hosea the prophet (remember, he has a whole book of the Bible) was married to one of those.

But I see no renunciation of Christ. In fact, I see evidence to the contrary. Unlike myself, Vincent was a Calvinist. Strictly speaking, these guys think that one is "Once Saved, Always Saved". Which means, once you have been compelled, via Holy Election, to accept Christ, you will not stray, in spite of any evidence to the contrary. For you non-theologically minded, let's put it this way: if you were VG's father, a Calvinist minister, you would believe in the secure salvation of Vincent, no matter what he did after accepting Christ.

His parent's ungracious behavior towards him was understandable, in sociological terms. The first people you lose when you leave behind your sanity are your family. Turns out, more tragically, that many of Vincent's immediate family had dementia in their final days, due to the ravages of syphilis.

Of course, van Gogh is a father of Modernism. Yes, he exalted self, art, and nature. Certainly these things may crowd out the heart's room for God. I see nothing in that, however, to irrevocably overcome his place in the eternal. God knows, not I.

For the irreligious this may be a painful and seemingly unnecessary post. But I don't know how, without bald redaction, one can study the artist van Gogh without his faith, or art history (western) without Christ. It would seem to be impossible.
Certainly, it needs to be said, that the trend among VG's historians to strip him of his salvation is probably ill-informed, at best. I don't think I would be too surprised, standing on the other side, that I should meet the great artist, Vincent van Gogh.

It appears that others have covered this same ground, and agree with my thesis.
See:
This article by Cliff Edwards on VG's faith.

Also: (In both articles the errors are left as is)
"Few images in modern art have so captured the attention of the public as Van Gogh's Starry Night, a painting that reveals all the light and glory hidden in an ordinary evening sky. In this very readable study of Van Gogh, essentially a spiritual biography, Kathleen Erickson explores the intense spirituality of the painter, from his early religious training and evangelical missionary work to the crisis that occurred when the church rejected his more radical way of following Christ. Erickson argues (against many Van Gogh scholars) that the artist's mature work reflects not a rejection of Christ so much as a rejection of a dogmatic church, seeing instead in the famous images of his art a profound connection to Christian symbols. Throughout, she helps us to discover the source of the power in Van Gogh's stars and sunflowers." --Doug Thorpe in this review of At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh.

From Publisher's Weekly:
"Erickson's account of the spiritual dimensions of van Gogh's work is an important corrective to two widespread assumptions: first, that his background was theologically Calvinist; second, that he abandoned religion when he began his professional career as an artist. Drawing extensively on van Gogh's correspondence, Erickson argues convincingly that the so-called Groningen school?(sic) more Arminian than Calvinist?was the foundation for van Gogh's religious outlook and that his abandonment of institutional Christianity (precipitated by disillusionment with his uncle and theological mentor, Johannes Paulus Stricker) was not so much an abandonment of religion as a move to synthesize Christianity and modernity via mysticism. Her discussion of van Gogh's late work is particularly compelling in this regard. Erickson's diagnostic discussion of van Gogh's mental illness is intriguing, though such extended discussion of whether he was epileptic, bipolar, schizophrenic or a combination is more of a distraction than a contribution to artistic or religious appreciation of his work. This work is a lucid and accessible contribution to understanding the religious character of van Gogh's artistic vision."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. (Pasted from Amazon)

I won't argue the Arminian vs. Calvinist parts, here.

This post was first published in 2007.

Munch's Scream Speaks Loudly

Follows is a re-posting of my essay on The Artist's Ideas, illustrated by The Scream, Edward Munch.

Edvard Munch
The Scream, 1893
o/c, tempera & pastel

A work of art can't be questioned or dismissed. Saul Bellow.

The obscure word ethos has a different meaning today than it did seventy years ago, and it has traveled a malleable path since the days of Aristotle. Whereas, today, it is a corporate creed, it formerly held a deeper meaning. Pre-war artists owned the word - it was the artist's ethos. My 1936 Webster's dictionary has the following:

Webster: From the Greek, ethos, ἔθος, character. The moral, ideal or universal element in a work of art as distinguished from that which is emotional in its appeal or subjective.

How do the artist's ideas exhibit themselves in an artwork? Is it important for an artist to express an ethos through the making of art?

We have been considering The Artist's Ideas, with these previous posts:
Have Ideas
Quotes - The Artist's Ideas
The Inner Meaning
The Artist's Ideas
Paint Better Now


The Artist's Ethos.

The Greeks saw ethos as the first proof of debate, and it had to do with trusting the moral competence of the rhetorician.Fast-forward to our concerns and the artist's ethos. Let's unpack the definitions of moral, ideal and universal elements.

The Moral Function of Art.
Webster describes a moral element in a given artwork, which is, by definition, an illumination of right or wrong. As concerns the formal parts of art, there is no right or wrong. "There is no must in art because art is free," Wassily Kandinsky. So, we are left with artworks that reveal a moral quality intended by the artist, such as in the case of Sacred Art. See below some artworks that reveal strong moral qualities in a broader context. See The Sistine Chapel for Sacred Art.

John Dewey said that “Art is more moral than moralities.” Artist and blogger Katherine A. Cartwright is reading Dewey's important 1934 book, Art as Experience, and hosting a community discussion on The Moral Function of Art. See here, here and here, and remember to read the comment fields.

Here is the "see below." For my part of the discussion at Katherine's blog, I have been illustrating the moral function of art by identifying individual artworks that I see as strong moral forces in the canon of Western art. Blogger/artist Linda W. Roth had the idea first, and she chose Edward Munch's The Scream for its moral content. I think she's right on with that, and I thought of Andrew Wyeth's Groundhog Day, and Willem deKooning's Woman 1. These artworks are linked below.

The following opens a window into Dewey's thinking: Art is morally powerful because it is indifferent to moral praise and blame (loosely quoted). Do you agree?

Ideals - The Artist's Ideas.

Notice that the Websters definition relates to a work of art, and not the group known as artists. My understanding of "the ideal" is that an artwork must, to be true to the artist's ethos, reflect his ideas. See these quotes on The Artist's Ideas.

Universal Elements.

Art is a universal mode of language. John Dewey. Philosophers will tell you that language is wanting in descriptive power - it falls short of expressing what man is able to think. Art is a huge bridge in "speaking" to mankind aught words.


Edvard Munch, The Scream.
Andrew Wyeth, Groundhog Day.
Willem de Kooning, Woman 1.




Ethos at Wikipedia.
John Dewey, Art As Experience.

The Scribbler

@@@

Excerpt from The Scribbler article.

The article, Authenticity & Your Art, is one I hope you'll save and read at your leisure.  Find out about your authority as an artist.  Thanks to the Pastel Guild of Europe for publishing this.

"Authority is as uncommon now as it ever was," Casey Klahn.

Article at The Scribbler.


I am also pleased to receive two reviews and a short biographical statement written by my friend, author, and fellow at-home-daddy, Terry Gildow.  I will show you those at a later time.


Further reading on the topic of the artist's authenticity, The Artist's Ethos.

Dealing With The Wolf, In Which I Tell a Rock Climbing Story, Get Long-Winded, and Bring It Back Around To Art.

Riverside Grays

@6" x 6"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

Every art has it's context.  Just because you want to paint the future thing, this doesn't mean you will necessarily have to lose the older things.  These things can co-exist: the new and the old.  Wolf Kahn employs the uber-abstractionism and expressionism of his era (which era still continues) and yet he paints nature.  It is a balancing act that has to be done; a voice that must be heard.


In a comparison from my days as a rock climber, I think of the old-timers (many of whom I have talked with and had the pleasure of being at the same crag with) who used a climbing trick of standing on their partner's shoulder to gain a high reach.  What do we painters do when we consider the earlier painters?  Do we stand on their shoulders, or do we put our foot on their face, so to speak, and say, I have no regard for you?  Whatever the case, we still find ourselves elevated to the higher stance by their work and its stature.


To continue the metaphor, I well remember the first time I led through on a hard rock climb that my mentor crumped on.  He offered me to lead through, which was a compliment.  For some inexplicable reason, the thing worked out, and I climbed past my master (just once).  To fill out the analogy, this climb was rated the same as a particular climb that is near Los Angeles and was the hardest climb of the decade of the nineteen fifties.  I met the first ascensionist and we got to be on a first name basis for a short while.  My hero, whose work was breakthrough stuff a few decades past, was now easy to match.  But, only because the march of time had brought his knowledge and techniques forward for every man to obtain with some effort.


I tell this story because I often think of the challenges we face when we try to be good painters today.  There are more paintings to paint and we can certainly try to paint to the highest standards, if we just put in the effort. 


This stream of thought is my response to an article about Wolf Kahn at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in 2007.  Anyway, you should go read that if you are still with me this far. An excerpt:

The question of whether to use landscape to "capture" a moment, place, or light thereof, or whether to use it as a means to deliver personal self-expression, is one of the philosophical forks in the road for some landscape artists who choose one or the other. Kahn seems to be well aware of the question and quite satisfied not to answer it. Color can be subservient to place, or place subservient to color. Image can be subservient to abstraction, or abstraction subservient to image. All could have come from nature or from the artist's process. That's the game, so to speak. Find the painting.

I Enjoy Making Analogies Between Rock Climbing and Art Making, But Nobody Ever Gets It.  I Do Them Anyway.

Rude Writer Must Read

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Home Much?

"...my idea of what a house should be is dead."  Sippican Cottage.


This guy writes essays like you burn toast.  Often, and well.

***

The Artist's Ideas

"Pittura est cousa mentale"
Painting is a thing of the mind.
Leonardo da Vinci

Imagine entering a beautifully appointed building, in which there are many rooms hung with original fine art. Some of the paintings are by masters, such as Rembrandt, Eugene Delacroix, Mary Cassatt and the like. Others are by unknown or little known but well respected artists from past eras. Still more are by contemporary artists in practice today.

You are just one of a large crowd of viewers, pausing at one painting, then another and another. There are no docents chattering; no plaques or notes posted to annotate your visit. Somehow, as the throng proceeds, they note little of each image, and by the time they spill out of the exit, most even have trouble remembering the names of the creators of the paintings or the subjects painted. By the time he orders his latte at the cafe, one patron has no recollection at all of even one image seen in the exhibit, and that is a representative experience of the crowd as a whole. He flips open his cell phone, and starts to read his texts.


Nothing was gained by this visit to the art exhibit; no memorable emotive experiences will be remembered. The coffee was good, but the viewers did not partake of any of the artist's meanings, and they go away with souls unfed.

Whose failure was this? Was it the lack of curatorial effort? Surely, but I lay the blame mostly upon the artists themselves.

Don't get me wrong. Rembrandt's meanings are readily available to his audience, as a painter of beauty in respect to all mankind and as an advocate of excellence in oil painting. Cassatt gave impressionism the delicacy of pastel's grace, and the charity of womankind exampled in the mother and child. But, in my imaginary tour (which idea I took from Kandinsky in his writings) the meanings of each artist, from the known and all others, is obscured by certain factors.

The hanging, although beautifully lit and nicely placed, contains artworks whose elements are so diverse, and confused in subject, type and style, that any hope of ascertaining a meaning is lost. Tragically, the majority of the works displayed do not have a foundation in ideas, but rather are pretty pictures set adrift in a sea of misspent intentions. It wouldn't hurt to have a patronage well schooled in visual basics, so that they may understand art's intent when they have the opportunity. But, we are taking up the question of The Artist's Ideas in this series of essays.

When you read my essay series on How to Paint for the Prize, posted last year, you may have noticed that I wrote a lot about content. Half of the posts described the artist's motivation through his ideas. Now that my exhibition season has, for the most part, ended this year, I am wanting to write more in-depth on this holy grail of the artist's true goals: The Artist's Ideas.

Now the prize is no longer my personal best, but I have resolved to triple the quality and the value of my art by next year. How will that be done? Mostly by resolving the core issues that exist for any fine art. I want to present my ideas in comprehensible ways through visual means. Read this series of essays on art content to see how core ideas can illuminate the visual artist's work.

"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale," D.H. Lawrence.

To really understand the foundation of this series, you ought to read again the series on How to Paint for the Prize. These are the posts:

How to Paint for the Prize
Commit
Looking for the Why
Quotes on Content
What Are Your Ideas?
Content
Get There Quick!
Edit Your Own Work


Art museum photo: toni_janelle at photobucket

Paint Better Now

Towpath in Winter, After Wolf Kahn
Pastel
8.5" x 11.75"
Casey Klahn

A new essay series is in the works and I will post very soon. Last year, after returning from Sausalito, I wrote about how to get a juicy prize for yourself. I want all of my readers who are artists to excel, and you will find some inspiration in that series. If you aren't an artist, but want to reach for the brass ring in any field, have a look. How to Paint for the Prize.

The upcoming series is a result of some recent conversations I've been having with artists and patrons. I want to offer you my ideas about creating art that is based on the best common denominator - ideas themselves. The most accessible fine art has some truth to reveal, and if you want to swim in that pool of making art that speaks, you must have ideas.

Meanwhile, I have been busy cleaning my studio and getting ready for the next events. At the same time, I am doing some professional development by taking a course online from the excellent Deborah Paris.

Please stay tuned.