perspective.

So I was in a foreign country with the other adult in my family and our kid, and the roads on this mountain were, like, made of rocks. Not gravel: big, nasty, rocks. (and it turns out that rocks are better than mud, in case you're wondering, because rocks give the tires purchase when it rains).

And we're heading down the side of the mountain in the car and it turns out that the car has a flat. Our 2 wheel drive 4 cylinder sedan has a flat. And it sounds like every little bump is so loud and rough that the car is going to tear itself apart. I mean, it sounded like the axle itself was dragging along the ground. It just sounded really awful.

We traveled down the side of the mountain this way for something like two miles. It was the longest two miles ever. People on the road would pass us and point. I was driving like no more than 5 miles per hour. I was sweating. It just took forever.

We pull into the service station and the service station guys look at the car and the tire and they just start banging the hell out of it because the flat tire is actually stuck on the car. They're kicking the shit out of the thing, and they're using all sorts of metal instruments and they're going to work and it's not happening. I mean, the tire isn't coming off. Everything seems pretty grim.

And that's when we realize that the family's debit card is missing.

So that's when it gets, like, exponentially worse. We've just come back from the rainforest, so we're thinking that the debit card is maybe in the mud on a trail or something, or maybe it was pick pocketed or whatever--it's just, like, really bad. We can't find the debit card.

At this point I'm probably having a heart attack. A small one. That's what it feels like. And we're tearing apart bags and going through the trunk and the back seat. And the guys at the service station continue to kick the shit out of the flat tire. Everything just feels,...like a big problem. Not like a I've-been-kidnapped-and-forced-to-work-in-a-diamond-mine problem, and not a my-husband-of-20-years-was-just-diagnosed-with-cancer type problem, but the problem feels very immediate and extreme, because we're in a foreign country on top of a mountain, miles and miles away from any real civilization and the rental car as a flat and the DEBIT CARD IS MISSING.

It turns out that our kid is like the master-finder-of-all-things. And she saves the day. she finds the debit card in a random pocket of the big bag we're carrying around.

And suddenly, everything is better. Which is why I'm telling you this story. For three minutes, our bad problem was elevated to a really bad problem. And when we found the debit card, the tire suddenly seemed like so much less of an issue. In three minutes time, everything changed,...even though nothing at all had really changed. The flat tire was still stubbornly attached to the car, and we were still up a mountain with 15 miles of mind-bogglingly awful gravel road between us and the nearest real city.

But it turned out we had the debit card. Had never really lost the debit card. It was with us the whole time.

Sometimes I get stuck in these problems and I forget about all the things that are going right. Which is why I like that story. 

I started watching Mad Men and I've realized something

So I started watching the first season of Mad Men and it's what you would expect: men in an office smoking, men wining and dining, men acting like pigs. Pretty wardrobes. 

I knew that there would be a lot of sexism, but I just can't get over it. There's a LOT of sexism. And it's not just the men. The women are sexist against themselves! It's just like I've always heard, about how women were taught their place was the kitchen, how they needed a protector, they weren't as smart as men, blah blah. and they bought that shit. they bought it.

The main character is that guy Don Draper you've probably all heard about. And he's this womanizer who, like, seems to pick a different woman to satisfy every different part of his personality, every different need. This one the mother of his children, the obedient wife, that one an independent artist, that third one a successful heiress and business woman.

DD's wife is a poor thing raising their two kids in a beautiful house in a lovely neighborhood on Long Island. Sounds horrible right?

Actually, no, it sounds idyllic. A nice yard, sweet kids. Enough money.

But she's getting numbness in her hands and has been told it's probably psychosomatic but she can't decide what could possibly be wrong with her. How could she be unhappy? Doesn't she have it all?

Every house on their block looks the same, every household is the same. The women are in the kitchen, smoking and gossiping. The children are wearing cowboy hats. The men are dressed in suits and working in Manhattan and parting their hair to the side with lots of hair product.

There's a woman down the block from DD's wife who is this like ostracized dissenter--she's a divorcee--and all the other housewives on the block have turned on her. They even said that a divorcee can lower property values, but I doubt this is the real problem. the problem is she BROKE THE RULES.

See, DD's got everything he's supposed to want and he's not happy. The same goes for DD's poor wife. But they don't do anything except live with it and wonder. The divorcee is like this...you know...knife in their side. This nagging reminder that it doesn't have to be the way they've been taught.

At first I was just floored by the lack of options facing the women in this time period. Their job choices, their life choices. They're told what to want. They're given a narrow number of job opportunities and can have no career if they want a family. And they must want a family. And they have to keep their house perfect and smile for their husbands and rely on their husbands, etc.

Their lack of choices kept swirling around in my head until it struck me that the men have a startling lack of choices as well. They look the same, they sound the same, they act the same. They provide, they drink beer, they wear sweaters, they smoke. They make sexist jokes. They must provide. 

Some months ago I wrote an entry about how I was reading A Wrinkle In Time. This is what I said:

"The kids in Wrinkle In Time are on this planet where everyone has submitted to IT, and IT controls their minds and actions and those who don't submit to IT must be reprogrammed and reprocessed in a way that's very mentally painful. It's actually very creepy and dated at the same time."

I said in the entry that I thought that the fear of "IT" was about communism. I just assumed. I don't even know why, exactly, that a loss of identity and communism must go hand in hand. I just know it must. Because I have been taught that communist governments control their populations with an iron fist. I still assume this to be true although I really know surprisingly little about the way communism plays out in a real world situation. I have heard stories about long lines for bread in Russia and about media censorship in China. 

And I'm not saying that A Wrinkle In Time isn't about communism. Or that I really know that much about real life in the 1960's just because I've now seen the first five episodes of Mad Men. 

I'm just saying, the first season of Mad Men takes place in 1960. A Wrinkle In Time was first published in 1962. Coincidence? hmm. 


One more thing, unrelatedly. 

The knotty pine kitchen in the Draper house... 

I have that kitchen. I have the knotty pine cabinets. it's so kick ass. I even have a stove from 1949. and it's so kick ass.

That knotty pine is going to last those Drapers forever, for better or worse.

By William Blake

I taught the kid poetry. My kid. I taught her a few poems, to recite them.

I recite poetry. To myself. It's a hobby. Sort of. I like to recite poetry to myself when bored. When doing dishes. And then one night I was...I don't know, I was doing something with my kid near or in the bathroom...and it was something mindless like helping her with her hair or helping her dry off after a bath or whatever, and I taught her the first few lines of one of the shortest poems I knew:

Oh rose

Thou art sick

The invisible worm 

That flies in the night 

On the howling storm

Has found out 

thy bed of crimson joy 

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

It amazed me how quickly she learned it. This girl seems to reject literature in most forms. Rote memorization though... She's fine with that. So now it's this game: I say the first line, she recites the rest of the poem and completes it with an attribute to the author at the end. William Blake.

I picked it because it was short, but It's a hell of a poem to teach to a pre teen. I think, really, it's about (invisible worm) venereal disease. I have mentally dissected this poem and I see a stupid, innocent girl (rose), candle flames and red wine (dark secret love), silk sheets (crimson joy), fever, ruination (howling storm), early death. 

Probably there are subtler, more elegant interpretations. Mine is vulgar and obvious. 

Maybe it's not about vd, maybe it's about another kind of ruination. An affair and a scandal and a ruined girl. Societal ostracism. Rumors and whispers and nasty, bored housewives. Or maybe it's about a sick child. Cancer. Viral infection. Who knows.

But it's William Blake. That means at its core it is about loss of innocence. Even the "sick child" interpretation involves its own loss of innocence; realizing that life is cruel and horribly unfair, a dying child must lose innocence. 

I went to the garden of love 

And saw what I never had seen

A chapel built there in the midst

Where I used to play on the green

And the gates to this chapel were shut

And "thou shalt not" writ over the door

So I turned to the garden of love 

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw that it was filled with graves

And flowers where headstones should be

And priests in black gowns 

Were making their rounds

And binding with briars

My joys and desires.

Another Blake. Another poem to recite with sudsy hands.

We were taught Blake in high school. From what I remember, we got the "crappy" Blake. The boring Blake. Tyger Tyger burning bright. (If I remember correctly this is a poem about child labor, but no high school student could ever find the tyger metaphor compelling... Had I been taught the garden of love poem, that would have caught my attention)

I recited the garden of love poem to my daughter while painting the driveway gate and she said, disgusted, "are all poems about death?" (This is why the second poem I taught her was Dancing Pants by shel Silverstein)

I went to a William Blake show in London in 2001. I made the mistake of going on the last day it was in town. It was hot and crowded and his drawings are small and detailed. I caught glimpses of his sketches over the shoulders of strangers. 

If William Blake were alive today he would be drawing comics in his basement. And according to this posting by Mallory ortberg on "the toast.net" website, he would send seriously weird text messages to his friends. Read it here: http://the-toast.net/2013/10/23/texts-william-blake/

It's 11:40 at night and I have written this entire entry from my iPhone, so I can't make a hyper link to this website. You'll have to do the hard work yourself if you want to read it. And if you've made it this far in my rambling entry about William Blake, you really should read it. It's hilarious and weirdly poetic. Here's a little sample...William's texts are in italics. 

"I drew you something
oh wow
is it horrifying?
no
do you promise?
William?
do you promise me that it’s not horrifying?
i drew you something
William
you know what I mean
what do you mean by horrifying
is anyone being
flayed alive in it
or committing suicide
or does something have eyes that shouldn’t have eyes
you know what I mean
horrifying
never mind
sorry i bothered you"

I like to think about this version of William Blake, as he might exist in the 20th century. Socially awkward. Brilliant. Disturbed. In need of a friend who understands (or at least humors) his weird impulses.

God. If only I had a friend this strange. Someone who might show up on my lawn in the middle of the night wearing aviator goggles and carrying a test tube full of India ink. Ready to draw my portrait and talk about the end of the world. 

Not that I would be prepared to handle such a friend. My family would not approve.

It's midnight now. I will stop writing this, after I mention one more thing... There's a William Blake book covering his illustrations of the divine comedy. Here's a nice article on brain pickings, talking about the book and providing several beautiful pictures. http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/17/william-blake-dante-divine-comedy/

See what I mean? He'd be in a basement drawing comics.

Merry Christmas. Look at this awesome website!

And so, it's 2am. Christmas Eve morning. Blustery here. The wind almost sounded like rain. I turned on my phone to check the weather. Next thing I knew I was surfing the news. Course there's nothing going on in the wee hours of Christmas morning, so this was among the first stories in my "news" aggregator: http://cardboardboxoffice.com. I cannot seem to create a hyperlink with this app so you'll just have to copy and paste it into a browser yourself. It is a link to a blog made by a couple who like to recreate scenes from their favorite movies  using cardboard props made from boxes leftover from their recent international relocation. They post photos of said recreations, starring themselves and their baby. Not sure what the heck I'm talking about? Take a look for yourself. It's damn adorable.

This website raises all kinds of questions (how do they do this how long does it take what gave them the idea) but mostly I'm just wondering, why am I not this cool???

why jonathan franzen doesn't like apple computers

About half way through our family vacation this summer, we got into the habit of watching one movie every night. This was in Costa Rica, where free wifi in hotels seems to be a given as long as you stay in hotels within a certain price range (it's possible it's a given in other hotels outside our price range but that I wouldn't know). My partner streamed the movies onto her Ipad and my daughter held the Ipad in her lap. We snuggled up together on the bed, my partner on one side, I on the other. It was a very cozy way to watch movies. The first movie we watched was the 1991 flick City Slickers, which I had not seen for many years.

Assuming that you've seen this movie, you might remember the conversation where Curly the crazy trailhead tells Billy Crystal's character Mitch that there's just ONE THING in life that matters? Curly holds up his gloved hand and with raised finger indicates that there's only "one thing," and Mitch cracks some joke about how the "one thing" is Curly's finger and Curly gives him that look like "you're such a moronic jackass I can't believe it" and  then he says that the only thing in life that matters is one thing.

I've been thinking about that one thing quite a bit, since we watched that movie in Costa Rica. It's a silly movie, so maybe this makes me kind of a silly person. but ...you know. I have one thing issues. I worry about a lot of stupid crap.

There's an article that was just published in the Guardian by Jonathan Franzen. I have never read anything Franzen has written until today. I understand that he wrote a book that made a splash a few years ago, but I can't remember the name of it at the moment. I have avoided this book for reasons I do not really know.

This very long article is called What's Wrong With the Modern World. I've been reading it between trips to the bathroom and on the way to and from my car, and at other times when I find myself walking for more than 10 seconds at a stretch. This is the only time I can really take to read during the day.

Just reading this article I started to dislike Jonathan Franzen a little. He's very intellectual and elitist. there's a word that starts with "pre" that I can't quite think of at the moment.

This article by Jonathan Franzen focuses on the works by an old writer named Kraus, whom I have never heard of, but who is apparently intentionally difficult to understand in his writing style. I'll admit I just skimmed the passages by Kraus because I'm busy and it's hard to really delve into someone who intentionally writes that way when you're walking to the bathroom that's only 20 feet from your office.

Kraus (in the early part of the 20th c) wrote a lot about the degradation of society, and Franzen draws a lot of connections between Kraus' issues/fears and Franzen's own issues/fears. And somewhere in there, Franzen pretty much says that what's wrong with the world can be summed up in our obsession with Apple computers. That we like form over substance. We like what's "cool." We like the slick design of macs, we like the way macs look and we like the way we look with one in our hands. And in fact, we just want to be cool period. But "cool" is meaningless.

Franzen raises all kinds of issues with Facebook and blogs and Twitter and modern technology. He says that the Internet is full of shit and we spend a huge majority of our time surfing the Internet, which is full of corporate shit and empty content. So we ourselves are more empty because of it.

I pretty much agree with 90% of what Franzen had to say, and I have thought about all these things myself. But I kind of thought Franzen sounded like an intellectual, elitist, judgmental pompous jackass while he was saying it. Pretentious (that's the word I was looking for earlier).

JF: so what if Salman Rushdie has a twitter account? so does the American Red Cross. So what? they can put it to good use. and frankly, Twitter did play a big role in the Arab Spring and just because the majority of people use twitter in trivial ways doesn't mean that no respectable person or organization could use Twitter as a useful platform for spreading important messages or meaningful thoughts... and another point: apple computers work better than PCs. That's why we like them. Really--apples have form AND function. It's not just the sleek design...it's that apple computers are better than PCs. I used to buy a new laptop every two years, but I'm writing this on a macbook that's 6+ years old and it just. keeps. going. I like macs because I've learned better.

I don't know if my one thing is my family, or art, or reading, or beer, or comfort or nature, or if I have one thing. If there is one thing. But there should be. (I was kidding about the beer...I know that's not the one thing). THere should be a clear set of priorities--one or two things--that really take precedence over other things. One of Franzen's points, and I agree with him, is that I shouldn't bury my face in my Iphone all day. I should read real books, value real content and ignore cheap content. And Curly's point is that I should focus on the real priorities and ignore the rest of the crap out there. And there's a lot of crap out there.

Maybe one of the little ironies I'd like to point out is that I spent all day with my face glued to my Iphone, reading Franzen's article, a little bit at a time.

sea change, Turin Brakes

I used to be a pandora addict, but at my new job I'm in an office with my boss and another co-worker, so I'm more careful about my use of space, and I really don't listen to Pandora as much anymore. My favorite station is the Mumford and Sons station (oooh doggies I love Mumford and Sons). This song, Sea Change by Turin Brakes, comes up sometimes on that station. I have never heard of Turin Brakes except in this one context, but this song catches my attention every time I hear it, so I just watched the music video this morning.
It's really captivating. You have to watch:



Ok. The use of toy soldiers. Why?? why choose toy soldiers over real soldiers? probably for budget reasons. But I wouldn't have it any other way. The use of toy soldiers is good for the following reasons:

a. It's a little weird--kind of like watching Gumby--so it makes me really actually want to watch it. I'm hooked to the screen for 4 minutes.

b. Besides the fact that this is made with toy soldiers, everything else seems fairly conventional--it's a typical injured-and-maybe-dying-war-hero-agonizes-over-past-deeds-and-losses set up. He's laying in the bed and he's thinking about the things that have led him to this day. It's so formulaic that you can really imagine an actual live-action figure laying there in the bed, going through the same thing. It creates this vivid picture in my head. I think to myself, this is just a stand-in for a real person. And then I can impose the image of the real person over the image of the toy soldier.

c. You have to wonder what the use of toy soldiers symbolizes here. As I already mentioned, I think it was probably a budget choice, but I still ask myself, what does it mean? to use toy soldiers? You could go a lot of directions with this question. You could say something about boys playing with toy soldiers and romanticizing war. or maybe the toy soldiers show how removed we are from the actual wars that take place in far away places, not on American soil... (I have family members who have served in armed conflict but am not close to anyone who is currently serving anywhere, so even though I listen to the news and form opinions about our involvment in conflicts over seas, it all seems very distant to me). You could also use the argument that using toy soldiers makes this mini drama seem more like art and less like life. The little pretend explosions LOOK PRETEND. It's all pretend. And you can view all these intricate details--the expressions carefully painted on the faces of the dolls, the carefully constructed miniature architecture--for what it is. An art project. A cinematic experience. Not real. But still, that radioactive maw in the side of that building looks very threatening and says something very bad about what that soldier lying in that bed in that hospital is going through, will go through. So you connect back to the life and death issues that this art symbolizes. In other words, there are many layers to this piece.

You could say my little critique of a music video here is kind of a silly way to spend my time--I'm over thinking it maybe. But I'll point that the chorus in this song starts off with the lines "if we don't do this, somebody else will" (which feels true about war) but ends with "if we don't do this, nobody else will" (which also feels true...) --and I never would have connected this song to war or paid much attention to the lyrics had I not seen the music video, and I think that deserves consideration.

Jane Gottlieb -> Andy Warhol -> Madeleine L'Engle -> Communism -> Individuality -> Gay Marriage? -> Gottlieb again

So, Jane Gottlieb's prints are on display in the building where I work. The colors are sort of flat and bright and I don't find the subject matter interesting. I'm not even sure what medium was used to create them--I assume they're computer-manipulated and printed on some kind of photograph-quality paper. The subject matter is kind of random but stays within a certain box--a golf course, a cemetery, a famous monument or building. Taxis and cars and houses. You know, man-made things. Things we have created.

They're very Andy Warholish, in a variety of ways. You know what I mean--very empty and decorative, what you might expect to see hanging in a posh hotel or in some expensive apartment overlooking Wall Street.

What is her message? Why does she spend her time on these pieces? Are they supposed to be cheerful, or garish? Are these pieces about finding fantasy in everyday life? About the notable lack of fantasy in every day life? What is she trying to say with this work? How do these color choices support her message?

Actually, her pieces are so reminiscent of Andy Warhol to me, that it's hard to imagine she doesn't have a similar sort of point to make. Something about decorative emptiness and the flattening out of reality and becoming less ourselves and more two-dimensional. Although, Gottlieb portrays it in a way that makes it look like it's supposed to be some happy thing, like the world we live in should be one long music video--neon everywhere! Cars! Rainbow colors! Flat, computer manipulated garbage as far as the eye can see!

And then--oh dear, this is a quote from her website: "I hope...to create images that surprise and intrigue, drawing the viewer into my idyllic vision, ultimately uplifting them with vibrant color and evocative beauty."

So I guess that settles that--she's actually producing art that is like...the opposite of Warhol's work, because if I remember correctly, he was famous for making these grim, scary statements that made his art seem kind of ominous and illustrative of something much larger that was going on culturally at the time.

From his interview with Art News in 1963*:

"Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody."

That quote about people becoming machines comes back to me from time to time. Actually, it ties together nicely with the book I'm reading now, A Wrinkle In Time. My daughter is reading this book for school and I am reading it with her, and it turns out that this book is basically about the 1950's/1960's fears about communism. When I started this book, I had no idea what it was about. I guess I knew her books were about science and in some way about religion and the weird gray area where religion and science can hold hands and be friends. But there was obviously a big political and social component to her writing as well. The kids in Wrinkle In Time are on this planet where everyone has submitted to IT, and IT controls their minds and actions and those who don't submit to IT must be reprogrammed and reprocessed in a way that's very mentally painful. It's actually very creepy and dated at the same time.

Why don't I worry about losing my individuality and creativity, whereas in the 1950's and 60's this was obviously something that haunted the minds of normal people? The quote above from Andy Warhol, "Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way," has some small grain of truth but strikes me as the sort of thing someone says to sound profound, but that lacks the nuance that could actually make it true. I am an individual. I don't like all the same crap as everybody else, although I do like some of the same crap, but I am aware of the ways in which I am the same and am different from the people around me. I fall into some categories, and some labels can be applied to me: "democrat" and "gay" and "middle class" are all examples of these. But I'm not like all the gay middle class democrats. For one, I am not pro-choice. I mean, I sort of am pro-choice. I believe abortion clinics should stay open. And I believe abortions should be rare and that for the most part, women should stop having them. I'm also not, like, obsessed with the topic of gay marriage, a very hot topic in the gay community right now that many people feel very strongly about. I think there should be gay marriage, but if the government wants to say I can't get legally married, I don't really care as much as you would think, because I don't care about marriage and even if I did care about marriage, I believe I could be happily married without the government declaring me married.** What does annoy the shit out of me is that the government is taxing me really heavily for the privilege of putting my family on my health insurance because of the no gay marriage thing, and I want my damn $300 a month back***. But that's neither here nor there. To be honest, I don't even really consider myself to be gay so much as flexible, and if my partner died tomorrow, there might be a man that took her place someday (after a long period of grief and you know, drama). Or another woman. Or I might stay single because having a partner isn't everything in life and I'm a busy girl with a lot of hobbies. So, my point is, I'm not like all the gay middle class democrats. I'm just me and I have no fear that I am becoming assimilated by cans of Campbell's soup and billboards that tell me what movies to like.

Back to Jane Gottlieb's pieces; I find myself thinking about them quite a bit, because I walk the halls where they hang. I'm a little disappointed after reading that statement from her website--the one above. "images that surprise and intrigue, drawing the viewer into my idyllic vision, ultimately uplifting them with vibrant color and evocative beauty." bleh. Andy Warhol told a much cooler, more intelligent story with his art.


But I think what you can take away from this post is that one doesn't really need to like art or an artist to affected by that art. It turns out, I have a lot to say and I'm saying it because of Jane Gottlieb's art, and it's art I don't even especially like. I suppose that's the point of any art--whether good or bad, art is supposed to provoke thought.

On a side note, there is one piece she did that I like very much. It's this one, which seems to have been plucked from a dream I had once. In this dream, I was a 19th century middle aged man living in a large house in Romania. Dracula came to my house and would not leave, and the villagers were rioting. My dream had a lot of purple, like this, and a lot of space. This is a space from that dream, I'm certain of it.

* I plucked that quote randomly from this website: http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/WarholIntrvu.pdf, and I take no responsibility for the accuracy of the transcript. I say this because I recently found out that the quote "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy" is not a quote from Benjamin Franklin, it's just a distortion of a quote of his about wine. Or at least, there are websites out there that claim this. And there are websites out there that claim he did say that thing about beer. All bets are off about who said what and what's true and what's not. About everything. I thought for ages that Benjamin Franklin said that thing about beer, about how it's proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. I had this picture in my mind of Benjamin standing in a smoky pub, raising his beer high and, you know, saying the thing about beer. Guys cheering around him and yelling hear-hear! and maybe he buys them all a round. And it turns out, maybe he didn't say this. My point is that information is hard to verify and even things that you know to be true might not be true. So maybe Warhol did or didn't say this thing I am quoting; I'm not going to dig through old issues of Art News just to find out if they said that he did. I just don't have that kind of time.

**I do realize that gay marriage isn't really just about marriage, it's about civil rights. So while I don't care about gay marriage exactly, I do care about inequality, and I realize that gay marriage isn't legal because of inequality. Inequalities shouldn't persist, and so while I don't care about marriage, I'm still supportive of the gay marriage cause. The government shouldn't be able to say that I'm not allowed to get married just because some Christians think that homosexuality is wrong. So that statement about me not caring about the gay marriage cause is sort of misleading.

***Do you hear me, supreme court? this is a huge burden and my family is just like all the other families in all the ways that count--my commitment to them is very real and binding--so if everybody else gets to put their families on their health insurances tax-free, then I should too--my partner and I own a house together and we've lived together for the last 15 years and we have a kid together and this isn't fair, but more than that, it's doing some serious damage to financial situation. If you legalize gay marriage I will marry her because I want them on my health insurance tax free and I'll jump through whatever legal hoops you have established that will allow me to do so.

pennies, baseballs

I'm having this rotten day and a friend just shared with me this website to cheer me up, the homepage of Jacqueline Lou Skaggs, who makes oil paintings on pennies. So my first but short-lived reaction to this was kind of like horror at the thought that this woman spends her time making these beautiful little images on pennies, because as a painter, I tend to put myself in the shoes of other painters and the little story that played back in my head when I saw this penny was the idea that I might spend all day painting something on a penny, using tiny little paint brushes, my eyesight going wonky and my back sore, bent over this penny for a tiny image best seen with a magnifying glass.

I flipped through the paintings quickly at first, zooming past this piece called Last Supper Table, depicting a table, just a table, where I noted briefly that it's a little strange to see a painting of a table and nothing else, but then what do you expect on a penny? Then there's this piece a few pennies down, of a town in the distance with the long rambling title: Through Carelessness He Loses His Cow. And I noted the fact that it's a wheat penny, the ghost of the wheat shape just visible. And so these thoughts then started running through my head:

1. these paintings have two images on them. Lincoln's head and a bush. The wheat penny, and a little town. The year, 1990 and a table. 
2. the texture of the pennies are lovely
3. the fact that each penny comes from a different year is noteworthy, making each piece an individual on many levels
4. these paintings are nothing but tokens, worth a penny but worth much more
5. they are tokens I could put in my pocket and take with me, and no one would know I had a painting with me.
6. I could trade them for other pieces of art, like baseball card trading. 

And then I saw this painting: the baseball one. Ah-hah. Yes, I like these paintings now. Just a painting of a baseball, why would anyone paint a baseball on the ground? It seems to tell no story. Well, I'll tell you why: because it's a painting on a penny. Simple is good. 

And it does tell a story, but most painters would not bother with a fuzzy little image of a baseball on the ground, because larger canvases make good platforms for grandiose ideas. 

But there are some big ideas in this little painting--something about baseball being the American past-time and pennies being American currency. A simple little image of a simple little baseball on our most basic form of currency. 

Can anyone tell me why this is called Four Witches Stand? I'm assuming this a play on the words "for which it stands, one nation under god indivisible" etc... but how is this related to baseball? it's the American past time, and a reference to the pledge of allegiance makes sense, but then where are the four witches coming from? This is a nod to the Salem Witch trials? The crucible? would baseball and the crucible be related somehow?

Crucible->Arthur Miller->Marilyn Monroe->Joe DiMaggio?

thoughts, please.

home/love

So these are the paintings I've been working on for the last few weeks. Actually, you could say that I've been working on these for the last few years. Figuratively, and literally you could say that. They were painted on reused canvases, some of which I laid the foundation for two or more years ago.

They are paintings of home.

I'm sure everyone has complicated feelings about their families. Sometimes I think my family is killing me. I didn't want these to be touching and loving pieces, but I didn't want them to be without love. They are meant to be gritty, messy paintings of the feelings I have about my family. how working so hard for them feels like running up an endless sand dune. But I would do it for them forever. And probably I will.

These pieces are somewhat abstract, somewhat primitive. I've had a hard time working in this style in the past. I have a hard time making paintings that seem raw, genuine. Studying art in college made me overthink my process. I didn't want these pieces to be like that.

Amazing how hard it is to get back to a primitive state. As adults, we refine and refine our actions, behaviors, character.

My daughter has made some of the most lovely poetry and paintings I've ever seen. I don't know if I've ever told her that. But my daughter, who has this primitive, unrefined, chaotic brain, has the ability to be so creative it blows me away. It makes my own paintings seem...like...imposters.

mama and baby

watched the last episode the 2nd season of downton abbey today. couldn't take my eyes off the tv but needed an excuse to keep the show on. picked up my paintbrush...

citrus and cactus blossoms.

Last night I made some new still life paintings of citrus. I had some clementines and limes in the fridge.

The pictures of these paintings didn't turn out very well. There are a lot of subtle tones in the background that don't come across in the photos. In the painting of the limes there's a pleasing, slightly yellow/slightly green tone in the background that just doesn't come across in the photo. Likewise, the background in the painting of the clementines is slightly more yellow than what appears in the photo. Just a little.

And, I finished the painting of Craig and the cactus flower.

I'm trying to decide what the subject of the next cactus flower painting will be. There's a night blooming cactus in my front yard that only blooms one time per year, and the blossoms last one night only. It's amazing. It blooms every year around August 1. I'm considering this for my next subject. Here are the pictures I took of the cactus this year:

First of all, aren't they incredible?? You know, I said that these flowers bloom every year around the first of August, but I have only been in this house for two summers now, and only seen this cactus bloom twice. So...what do I know.

I don't know if I'll ever forget the first time I saw this cactus blossom. The house was new, our stuff was still in boxes, I'd been living on Luna bars, I was exhausted. My family was away when we got the keys to the house and I did the moving myself. I'd just had this crazy, disastrous experience wherein I tore out the carpet and discovered that the hardwood floors in the hallway were black and stained. Look at this:

So then I hired this guy, who turned into a good friend (and an awesome handyman), to refinish the floors. Only I had so little money that I hired him for a pittance. And he completely came through for me. He worked for like three or four straight days, loooonnnnggg days. He didn't have a car, and in fact he lives like 45 minutes away, and I was picking him up every morning at like 7AM and dropping him off sometimes as late as 1 or 1:30AM. During the day I'd run errands for materials or spend my time writing freelance articles just trying to make a little more money. That was at the end of July. I moved in our stuff on the first of August and that took days because I was doing it by myself and trying to do it without hiring anyone because I had no money. (this is a common theme in my life:)

Plus...I don't know if you can imagine what my house looked like at this point, but just look at those floors. When we pulled out the carpet, there was tack strip lining the floor in every room. Nails. Debris. The carpet had left an old people smell that was slow to go away. Plus, I was convinced (I mean, convinced) that the people who lived in the house before we bought it were now dead. I knew they were very old, and that they had not died on the premises (there's actually a law that says you have to disclose that information if someone has died in the house). But I had some concerns (serious concerns) that the house was haunted. Because...look at those pictures of the floor and imagine a house that looks like that all over. It looked like a torture chamber.

It was hard to imagine it wasn't haunted. I was scared. I slept every night on the floor in the living room with the light on low and the television on. I even slept in my car one late night when I pulled in at 4AM with a load full of stuff that needed to be dropped off (I am incredibly scared of ghosts).

So by August 1ish I was bruised, under fed, broke, stressed and sleep deprived. My new house was a fearsome stranger in my life. And I stepped out of the house to take out the trash and go work one morning and I saw this.

A gift for me, from the house. To me it was a sign that all was ok.

Does CPR work on aliens?

I had never heard of Davis Cone before. I'm not sure if he's famous or if I am only one of a handful of people who have ever heard of him. I was surfing the Internets the other day and I found his website here.

The image titled "Bad Axe In Snow" (the top) is possibly my favorite. I don't know why. The colors? The contrast? The way red, yellow and orange neon signs reminds me of the first night I ever spent in Manhattan when my two friends and I walked up and down Christopher street and stared goggle-eyed at the adult toy shops, our faces pale blue and green in the harsh fluorescent lights, which seemed to embody some kind of depravity I was unfamiliar with at the time but which was becoming altogether very clear? Something about the bright neon lights in that painting just rings true. About night time in Manhattan. I have no idea where the Bad Axe theater is, by the way. If it's in New York. 

So this is what I love about paintings by Davis Cone:

• the fact that he paints movie theaters. Movie theaters, places I loved growing up, where special things happened. 
• Cars date his paintings, make me remember parts of my own life. The same happens with the fact that his movie theaters have signs that say the name of the movie playing at the time, which is genius. 
• all the movie theaters in his paintings look familiar, because all movie theaters look alike or share qualities, and that makes me realize that he is painting something that everyone in the US will think looks familiar, and that is powerful
• that the people in his paintings are always seen from behind, or from a distance, or in shadow with faces obscured, is lonely and sad, like paintings by Edward Hopper, who I admire and also captured neon lights and harsh fluorescents very well. 
• the small towns look like so many places from my childhood, while the images of new york strike memories of adulthood, and so for me that is powerful also
• the striking contrast between light and dark
• his photo-realistic style captures people and cars in mid-movement, so that they are sometimes blurred, as they would appear in a photograph, so that there is a sense that one is capturing a real moment, something fleeting and mundane on the whole but that has been captured so lovingly here that it may seem as though he has validated and given importance to something otherwise irrelevant.

I have to be honest, I'm not into hyper realism. It has always struck me, somehow, as an exercise in futility (because a photograph would do almost the same thing) and a very impressive parlor trick (because a photograph would do almost the same thing). What is the point? Why? On top of that, the very fact that, although I'm not sure I could paint in this same style myself, I know what it would take to get it done. The hours. The agonizing. The looking back and forth, over and over, between a photograph and a canvas. The comparing of colors. The seconds spent holding your breath as you try in vain to limit your movement to only the tiniest, most precise flick of the paintbrush. Again. and again. and again. 

Seeing paintings done in this style usually has an effect on me that is similar to fingernails scratching a chalk board. It's like smelling someone's vomit and then nearly vomiting yourself. (being very dramatic here) It's a sympathetic reaction. 

SO I haven't posted anything on this blog in a long time. I'd like to fix that. Where did I go? I don't know. My last post was January of 2011. Although I kept painting for a while after that last post, my family took away from time I would have spent writing in the blog. And then there were other things. Financial stuff. Other stuff. And then last year, around this time, we bought a house. After we moved, my painting supplies sat in a corner in the garage for an entire year. One year.

A month and a half ago I got a text message from a friend. It was a funny conversation so I'm going to post part of it online: 

Her: How's ur vacation going????? U paint as a side job right????

Me: It's awesome and yes I do:)

Her: Nice! How much do u charge? I can text u a picture

Me: I don't know what my rates are--when do you need it?:)

Her: Well it's for my parents wedding anniversary and it's today. I dont need today whenever. I can send u the pic I want.

That's all I'm going to post. I don't know how she would feel about me posting this conversation, but I hope that most of you got the punchline... "It's for my parents wedding anniversary and it's today."

ahah. yes. I dont need today whenever. (clearing my throat) funny. 

I don't know what it takes to paint in a hyper realistic style, but I can tell you that I did do the portrait, I tried to make it as realistic as possible and it took me about 20-22 hours. Although my friend didn't expect me to produce the portrait that same day, I don't think she realized that it was, like, going to take the effort that it did. "It's for my parents wedding anniversary and it's today." nice. 

don't you love the bizarre things that come to you in text messages? Today I took a CPR training class with that same friend and I texted her this question: 

Does CPR work on aliens?

I don't think she thought it was nearly as funny as I did because I could barely contain myself just thinking about it.

Anyway. 

So I hadn't painted in an entire year, and I hadn't painted a portrait of human figures in much longer. probably 12 years. I don't often go around showing my friends my paintings, because I don't always paint in a style that's realistic and to that matter I don't always know how to tell if paintings are any good. But the portrait of my friend's parents I knew would have an effect on people. I knew I could show that painting around and they would understand exactly what they were looking at, and whether or not they liked it. Whether or not it was "good." Plus, portraits impress people if you can do them right. So I hadn't painted a portrait in a long time and it turned out pretty well and I had to do a little boasting, so I showed it to a couple people.

So one of my very good friends is a 75 year old man who believes that no song or piece of music written after 1930 could be rightfully classified as music. I knew he would like the portrait. I showed it to him, and also the portrait I drew of walt whitman in high school.

He seemed impressed, which was the goal. I try not to make boasting a habit but there's nothing wrong in a confidence booster every 10 years or so.

He told me that he thought that most artists would, if they could, paint realistically. That any painting style that is not realistic is covering up for general incompetence. I had inferred that he felt this way based on previous conversations (this is a man who possibly questions whether or not the Beetles could be classified as musicians, although he does get a kick out of the "material girl"), which is why I very much wanted him to see my paintings, so that he would know that I do have that ability, to paint realistically, even if I don't always choose to use it.

And that's when we started talking about Davis Cone and Chuck Close, and of course my friend had never heard of these people. I showed him the paintings.

I really don't care for work by Chuck Close, probably for reasons relating to the aforementioned fingers on chalkboards and vomit and all that. I mean, I'm ok with the work. his paintings. I do see some value in these pieces that look like photographs because the paintings have themselves become like an excuse to look at these ordinary-but-weird faces.

The best example of this that I can think of is his painting of "Mark", who I have always thought of as "man with face like rat".

Afterall, under what other circumstances would I spend any time studying a face that looks like that, unless it was painting 8 feet tall and made by some kind of mad genius? Yet when I look at his hideous clothes and wide open, innocent eyes and I have to stare at him. and wonder if he's perhaps a serial killer still living with his mother. that's what he looks like to me. If I passed this man on the street I wouldn't look twice. I wouldn't even want to.

So that's the value of paintings by Chuck Close.

But Davis Cone. Ahh.

The word that comes to mind is "loving." Lovingly rendered. Beautiful, beautiful paintings. Movie theaters.

My last bullet point in the list at the beginning of this post (which is slowly turning into like a combination dissertation and endless biographical monologue), wherein I gave some of the many reasons why I liked paintings by Davis Cone, said this:

• his photo-realistic style ...(blah blah blah)... so that there is a sense that one is capturing a real moment, something fleeting and irrelevant on the whole but that has been captured so lovingly here that it may seem as though he has validated and given importance to something otherwise irrelevant.

I decided to recap that for you because this post is like the length of a dickens novel and if you've actually made it this far, you've probably forgotten what I started off talking about in the first place. I appreciate hyper realism in this case because there's some feeling that the time he spent on these paintings, which must have taken hours and days or years, has given weight to the subject. That some things are worth spending the time on. That some paintings, even if you could have just taken a photograph, are worth painting because the subjects themselves are worth the contemplation. The time. That making a painting in this way implies a tenderness for the subject. It's like a love letter. fuck yeah. 

There's this other guy, also a very realistic painter. Jan van Huysum. They've got some of his paintings at the Getty museum, which I have been to several times. They say that he only worked from live subjects and this man lived in the 1700's and he painted a lot of flowers, which means that he would sometimes take years to complete a single painting because he had to wait for flowers to come in season and other related complications. Here's an example of his work, I believe it's at the Getty: 

I get in trouble with the security guards at the Getty around this one painting by Mr. van Huysum because he painted--I shit you not--a fly on one of the flowers. So I can admire this particular detail, I get right up against the painting with my nose like within centimeters of the canvas, and the security guards say it's is too close and they make me back off.

A fly! Who would make this gorgeous painting of these amazing, vibrant flowers, only to put a fly on it?  What kind of man, what kind of painter, does that? What maniacal artist is so OCD, wants his paintings to be so realistic, he's willing to mar it with a fly? Or maybe, what sense of humor drives a respectable person to do that? I'm not even sure what about this fly impresses me so. Perhaps because I've never seen anyone bother to put a fly in a painting before. Perhaps because it looks just like a real fly. 

I could talk about this for days. About realistic paintings and the potential value of painting realistically. 

Since I painted my friend's parent's portrait, I've been working on a few other projects. I started painting some pictures of cows, for one thing. The picture below is titled "Purple and Clarence". Because that is the name of the cows. 

My best friend growing up, who is now the person I share my life with, had this obsession with cows when we were in middle school. She made up this whole story line about this group of super hero type cows, and named the group the Good Cow Brigade, and they (the Brigade) did battle with the evil cows, lead by the most evil cow of all, Chompy. The good cow brigade was so influential in our middle school years that I still call my mom "moo" and she still calls her dad "doo", and there is still a stuffed animal cow named Tuscany sitting on our bed. 

Cows are very special to us. And I love their box-like bodies. their vacant faces which seem prideful and disinterested. Their unmoving bulk. And painting them is particularly enjoyable, especially the ones with black on them. I love black, but only on cows. Of course I have to make the black myself by mixing blue and brown--I haven't a tube of black paint anywhere in the house. Inky, dark. Bottomless. 

The painting of Purple and Clarence I like because it of its soft, chalky quality. and I like the fuzzy edges around the cows, as if it all were a dream or a memory. an illustration of some idyllic, breezy field. 

Here's another painting I did recently:

It's not done yet. But it's close. This cow might be named Coffee. Or Craig. 

And then there's another project I'm working on, one that isn't coming as easily as the cows, and that's paintings of cactus flowers.

This is my first one. It's 20x20 inches (much larger than the cows, which were painted on small canvases) on gallery wrapped canvas. Oil paint, applied with paintbrushes and a palette knife. 

I'm painting cactus flowers because I think they're beautiful, and because I think they're even more beautiful when you contrast them against the cacti themselves, which are prickly and...uninviting. 

I'm not sure where to go with this one. I feel like the flower could use some work...it's relatively realistic, but in the middle of all this unrealistic chaotic color. What's a girl to do? Does anyone read this blog anymore? if so, can you give a suggestion?

I need to go. It's late. I barely slept last night. I've started binge-watching Downton Abbey on netflix. it's a great show. I'm going to go watch it and get some painting done. Also, I just finished watching the second season of the Sherlock show on the BBC. Please tell me some of you have seen it and that like me you re-watched the last episode of the second season like 4 times because you were trying to figure out the great mystery at the end. And that the reason you love the show so much to begin with is because you love the original stories and you think that this tv show manages to be a brilliant mixture of old stories and new portrayals of them. Then I will know I'm not alone. 

New Work

Since the end of the summer I've had a lot less time to paint. But it's the new year, and I'd like to be a little bit of a new me, making more time out of no time. I have two new pieces in my Etsy shop since Jan. 1--eggs and beer. The beer didn't retain its head during the painting, so had I added ice cubes to the beer, it really could have been tea. It was a dark red beer from Trader Joe's called Jumping Cow Amber Ale.

Below is the big piece I'm working on as a part of the New York City series (see Patchwork City).



This is a memory of our first apartment in New York, now almost ten years ago. We moved to NYC from Boston in August. I spent the July beforehand packing up our stuff while the family member I was moving with spent the summer in the Bronx getting a crash course in teaching in low-income neighborhoods. It was so miserable--everything was so miserable. I couldn't get a job in New York (I couldn't even get an interview), yet I had signed a lease for an apartment, promising to pay an astronomical sum in rent. I didn't want to leave Boston, that I had come to love, and I didn't really know if I liked New York (turned out that I basically didn't), and we were moving to Harlem, and let's say, I didn't fit in there.

On moving day I was up at dawn, and I had almost not slept the night before, and I was still packing when the movers arrived. Over the course of the day the moving van sat double-parked on Hanover street and as it did it collected traffic tickets, and the movers were so slow, and while they took many breaks and sat in the shade of the back of the truck, I made hundreds of trips up and down the iron staircase to my walk-up apartment, and in late afternoon they finally left with almost all my possessions and I closed the door on my first apartment. I had in hand a big box of plants and a rolling suitcase with a few things to keep me for the night. I took the China town bus into Manhattan and arrived late, but I had not been given the keys to my new apartment. For a week I'd been asking the management company of our new apartment to mail me the keys, and they hadn't, in keeping with their behavior over the duration of our time in that apartment. The man who represented the management company--Lin S********--acted so magnanimous when he told me that he would meet me at the apartment late that night to give me keys, despite having theater tickets.

I think of this painting as "Waited With Keys". The figure at the door is standing beneath the scaffolding that they never took down in the year we lived there. That same scaffolding used to electrocute people who touched the metal railings because they'd wired the lighting incorrectly.

This piece isn't done yet. I've been working on it since last September. Like Patchwork City, this is a 30x40 canvas. The brown and green combination is (to me) like the color of a threat or some poorly disguised enemy, which is in keeping with my memory of that night. And from behind all the windows I hear loud music and loud people and strange languages. Clutching my box of house plants. Showing up in an unwelcoming place, with no keys, hoping he would be there.

Bouguereau and the Real 19th Century

I just found the most fascinating article. Bouguereau and the Real 19th Century

There's just so much I could say about this.

This article is really long and many people will probably not go to the trouble of reading the entire thing (if any of it). The basic premise:

1. Academic painter William Bouguereau was among the greatest 19th century artists that the art world had never heard of (until at least after 1990).


2. Bouguereau's work was lost to history due to a massive conspiracy of art dealers out to make a great deal of money. By defiling Bouguereau's reputation and aggressively marketing modern art, said art dealers caused Bouguereau's work to all but disappear from museums for 50 years. (Note the point of the conspiracy was not really about Bouguereau/defiling Bouguereau, but it was about marketing a product, namely modern art.)

The author is, by the way, a HUGE fan of Bouguereau. A quote from his article, describing his first encounter with a Bouguereau painting:

I walked into the Clark Museum to see their thirty Renoirs, and after leaving the Renoir galleries walked out into a major hall, at the end of which was a painting that grabbed me body and soul. It was a life-size painting of four water nymphs playfully dragging a mythological satyr into a lake against his will. Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine, I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. It was so alive, so beautiful and so compelling. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousnessÖ..my mind started racing with unanswered questions. My first thought was "I haven't felt this way about a work of art since I stood before Michelangelo's David."

I know what he means, that feeling he's talking about, the sensation of being floored by a piece of art on the wall. I wouldn't put it that way, for fear of sounding...well...kinda nutty (admit it, "spiritual ecstasy" is just kind of goofy sounding). But I know that feeling.

[It's that holy shit feeling. Song of the Lark, by Jules Breton gives me that feeling, that sensation. You can't tell by the graphic on the website if you click on the link I've provided, because you'd have to SEE this painting to understand, but it's the sun--Jules Breton captured, really captured--the sun at dusk, when it's big and indescribably red/pink/orange. With oil paint, I'd have though it was impossible. I could stare at this painting for hours and wonder and think and explore ideas and imagine myself in the place of the woman in the painting. This piece is hanging in the Art Institute at Chicago, and I recommend you go there at least once in your lifetime. I'm digressing.]

I'm not going to comment much on the conspiracy theory in this article except to say that I think it sounds a bit outrageous. Artists, like writers and musicians, come and go in popularity. This seems natural to me. I'm not an expert in art history--the most I know about modern art history I learned in Peter's Contemp Trends class, and David's Modern Art History. And that was something like 10 years ago. However, this is another quote from the article:

Do we really want the works of Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning to be representatives of the best of what mankind can produce? They are a crude hoax.

Nevermind that the author of this article misspelled Pollock's last name. He also called him a hoax. Earlier in the article the author really laid it all out with these couple paragraphs:

Bouguereau was incredibly productive, painting an average of sixteen to eighteen paintings per year during his prime. But his dealer Goupil had a list a hundred deep, of wealthy collectors waiting for his work. Everything was sold long before it was finished. Dealers for these great academics sat biting their nails waiting helplessly for the products they needed to sell. Well, what kind of business is that? Any good business man knows that if you have ten of something and can sell two hundred, that you'd better get out there and find the other one hundred and ninety so that you can meet the demand and maximize your profits. But with the demand of the works by a specific artist, you can't go anywhere else except to that artist.

What a great solution Modernism had for this problem. Dealers welcomed it with open arms, and as the Academy and Salon fell into disrepute, they were the ones who took over the direction of art, and their advertising dollars made sure that the press played ball. So they celebrated artists and art forms where supply could keep pace with the demand that they were creating. Bouguereau painted eight hundred and twenty-six paintings, and fully seventy-five percent of them are master works of the highest level and half of those are full blown masterpieces. But it was still only eight hundred and twenty-six paintings. Alma-Tadema only produce four hundred and thirty-five during his life.

Do you know how many works were produced by Picasso? -- more than eighty thousand.

This seems to be the heart of the article. According to this author, you've been duped. Your artistic tastes have been shaped by art dealers who wanted you to prefer modern art--which could be realistically produced much faster and in greater quantities than traditional paintings. Furthermore, you've narrowly escaped being cheated out of a rich artistic history that was buried for half a century but that is slowly making its way back into museums around the world.

My 3 favorite paintings--I have them listed on my blog as "This is what I'd take if I had to live the rest of my life on a desert island and I could only take 3 paintings"

• The Song Of The Lark, Jules Breton


• Mariana In The Moated Grange, Sir John Everett Millais


• An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby

All of these pieces are very realistically rendered, traditional paintings. In fact, John Everett Millais was even mentioned in this article as one of the unfortunate 19th century artists whose career was covered up by the modern art scandal. If I had to choose favorite contemporary artists, I'd probably pick some of the backwards, retroactive American artists like Edward Hopper. And if I had to choose favorites among painters who don't work representationally or who don't place an emphasis on representational art, I wouldn't be picking anyone from the New York School or any of the other famous art crowds. I'd be picking some of the people whose blogs I follow now--artists who have benefited from the invention of modern art. And while I was never on the Modern art bandwagon in terms of my favorite artists, I would never believe for a second that contemporary, non-representational art is not really art, or that it is somehow less than other conservative, traditional art. This reminds me of the man at my office, a very good friend, who says that all real music was written before 1900. We talk about modern bands and he says, "that's not real music". And like that, he writes off about a century of music because he thinks it's noise.

But, back to this issue about the validity of realistically rendered art vs. unrealistically rendered or non-representational art.

I can paint and draw very realistically.

Here is a charcoal drawing of Walt Whitman I drew in high school. Note, uber realistic. I'd show some examples of my paintings from high school too but I don't want to bother my mom to dig them out of storage.

I don’t draw--or paint--this way anymore. I love the artists who do, but I don’t. Why is this?

I don’t like the painstaking process of looking back and forth between the model and the canvas. I don’t like to worry that something likes "just a little wrong". That one eye might be slightly higher than the other eye, that the color of the skin is just a little too pink or the mouth looks unnatural.

I love paint. I love the dribbles and textures. I want not to worry about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of an image. Furthermore, I resent the idea that a drawing can be right or wrong/good or bad, just based on the accurate placement of an eye or an ear. I don't want the art I make to exist on such a quantifiable scale. It feels childish--the notion that accurately rendered art is good just by virtue of looking like its subject.

To his credit, the author does not imply that Bouguereau is good simply because he has the technical facility to paint accurate looking people. The author's point is that Bouguereau is a master because he paints great artistic themes with great accuracy. The themes are an important part of the painting. I'll come back to that.

There is a certain attitude, something that bothers me, a kind of bias against realistic representation in art, as if those artists who still wish to work representationally are missing the point. I believe--and I do think I'm right--that I would have struggled more with the art curriculum at my college had I continued to paint and draw as realistically as I did before I entered college. That my art professors would have perceived this as a kind of failure to thrive. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'd have been just as successful in school had I continued to draw meticulously, painstakingly, painfully accurately as I did when I was younger. (there was at least one student in my program--a non-trad, and I no longer remember his name--who drew phenomenally accurately and who I recall was somewhat revered among faculty and students). Or, maybe one does need to let go of accurate representation in order to explore, even if one does eventually come back to accurate representation, after a period of experimentation.

I'd like to point out a few things about the organization that published this article. Art Renewal Center, Artrenewal.org, has a mission statement, including the following:

• To promote a return of training, standards and excellence in the visual arts.


• To provide responsible views opposing those of the current art establishment when warranted, especially as expressed in critiques of current art exhibitions, and in aesthetic philosophy.


• To disseminate the rich artistic heritage of 2500 years of accumulated knowledge in creating traditional, realistic images touching upon universal and timeless themes.


• To advance the understanding that Great Art begins with great themes and expresses them poetically through mastery of all aspects of technique.


• To repudiate the idea that development in art requires destruction of boundaries and standards, pointless emphasis on 'newness,' or pursuit of the bizarre and ugly as ends in themselves, and to expose as artistic fraud those works conceived only to elicit outrage.

Did you notice that? The use of the word "themes"? Let me talk for a minute about Bouguerau's themes. The author of this article wrote:

It was the artist's goal to show humanity as beautifully real and ideal as possible, encouraging all to strive for such ideals. The message is: Mankind is good and life is good.

This reminds me of Keats' line about truth and beauty.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I love all the Romantic poets, especially Keats. I've been to the Keats house in Rome and I've looked at his death mask and studied that lock of his hair and I wrote papers about him back when I used to write papers for classes and I've read his poetry and I love Keats. But I cannot escape the nagging worry that this particular statement is just fluffy b.s.

Truth and beauty are not one and the same. There's not even a lot of overlap.

Still, if you study the paintings by Bouguereau, you'll note several consistent characteristics from one piece to the next:

1. most/all the subjects are beautiful
2. most of the clothed women are outdoors and barefoot (and most of them are women), but there is no dirt on their feet
3. the female portraits feature accessories for the women (water jugs, sewing projects), but they're never doing work

This is kind of nitpicking, but its indicative of something greater going on in these paintings. These pieces have nothing to do with reality. The lofty themes expressed in these paintings are far removed from brutal, visceral, beautiful life. And, frankly, with some exceptions I find most of these paintings to be two-dimensional (as in, lacking in depth of content). There's no conflict here. No grit, no dirt, no strife. This romantic portrayal of ultimate beauty is just one limited vision of a multi-faceted universe.

As are all paintings. I suppose there's no way that any one painting could encompass all the good and bad, right and wrong, all the greatness and terror in the universe. So coming back to the mission statement of this organization...

On the one hand, Art Renewal Center seems to be making a very rigid claim that traditional art is superior to modern art (and what else could they mean by saying things like "promote a return of training, standards and excellence in the visual arts" and "creating traditional, realistic images touching upon universal and timeless themes"?).

It probably goes without saying, but I disagree. You can't measure the artistic superiority of one movement or period of time over another. Art is not moving in the wrong direction or a bad direction, and while I appreciate historical art, the current state of art is not regrettable or inferior.

Still. The Art Renewal Center's mission statement does touch on one thing about modern art that bothers me, which I will just very briefly bring up and maybe talk more about later because I've already spent waaayy too much time writing this. The modern art/contemporary movement has spawned the modern idea that art can be made anywhere at any time and it can be made thoughtlessly, casually, unintentionally, and this idea kind of haunts me. That art has no limits, is not defined. But I guess that's a different post.