Entry - 3.4.17

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

                                                       - Heinrich Heine

I am sick to death of cleverness.  Everybody is clever nowadays.  You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people.  The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.  I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.

                                                       - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Nobody wants to play the fool.  I’d prefer to be a James Bond kind of character: always comfortable in my own skin, never losing my nerve, ever ready with the perfect witty retort, impeccably dressed no matter what the situation, miraculously in the know as to how to pronounce and play all of those obscure French games of chance.  Wouldn’t that be great?  I think so.  But…

Even though my aspirations are high, my performance in real life is less than sterling.  I play the fool far too often.  This occurs for a host of reasons: the occasional shortfall in self-confidence, an entrenched aversion to dishonesty and deception, the excessive exuberance I can experience when caught up in an exhilarating moment, an insane playfulness that crops up in the most inappropriate situations, the inevitable clouding of judgement that comes with inebriation, a propensity to serve up awkward witticisms that escape from my lips without even the most meager second’s consideration.  Honestly, I could go on forever.

And though I take no pleasure in playing the fool, often experiencing a solid bit of shame and discomfit after coming up short for the zillionth time, I’m really not ready to attend charm school, take any snake oil cure or undergo a frontal lobotomy that will render me perfectly debonair, clever and appropriate.  Without a doubt, I believe that it is a willingness to transgress beyond social mores and conventions, to tolerate personal exposure and risk, that actually transforms human interaction into something meaningful.

My perspective as an artist mirrors this opinion; significant artwork cannot be created without revelation and peril.  Sometimes that means pushing innovation to such an extent that aesthetic evaluation becomes nearly impossible.  In other instances, the artist taps into his or her inner workings, dredging up profound memories, exposing fears, desires, proclivities and weaknesses, and in the process finds a visual language to convincingly excite an empathetic response in the viewer.  It only follows that artists striving to achieve significant expression will often create unsuccessful or discomfiting artwork.  (Unfortunately, my own oeuvre is generously stocked with plenty of unquestionable failures.)  The fact is great artists often make bad art.

While considering writing a blog entry providing a small selection of bad paintings, I immediately thought of the work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954).  Matisse is undoubtedly one of the giants of modernism.  He helped redefine how form and space are represented in art, making color the predominant element in their depiction.  He recognized that a painting is a two dimensional object that need not convince an audience that it is anything more.  Therefore, he ignored the rules of perspective, freed color from literalness, minimalized the effects of light and shadow on form and readily embraced distortion when doing so heightened expression.  Often his strange combinations of clashing colors inexplicably sing, his layering of complex patterning achieve a precarious harmony.

In his early days of experimentation and revolt, Matisse’s work is consistently of high quality, but at midcareer he has regular moments of lost resolve.  He begins to seek the comfort of defining form and volume, of using natural color, of recording features and details convincingly.  For me, this is understandable; Matisse was nostalgic for a facility that he surrendered when he adopted a modernist approach to representation.  Picasso experienced this also, but he would change modes completely, fully adopting a style that suited his mood and subject matter, usually producing a successful work.  Matisse took a different approach.  He attempted to straddle opposing sensibilities, borrowing elements anchored in both fauvist and realist doctrine.  The resulting hybrids are often particularly unsatisfying.

Henri Matisse - Odalisque with Red Culottes - 1921

Henri Matisse - Portrait of Marguerite Sleeping - 1920

Henri Matisse - Reclining Odalisque -1911

Similarly Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) retreated from an impressionist approach to painting and sought to revive in his work traditional features embraced by the great masters of the past.  It was impossible given his sensibilities and years of experience to simply change gears and fully adopt techniques and conventions never before mastered, so his work, as with that of Matisse, suffered during this period of doubt.  This was unfortunate for at those times Renoir unreservedly worked in an impressionist manner, particularly in the landscapes, he achieved a beauty unsurpassed.  Renoir was further handicapped by two other weaknesses: an inclination to portray the cute and pretty and an admitted fixation on flesh, so his oeuvre is peppered with paintings of doe-eyed little girls in frilly dresses, fashionable mademoiselles cuddling adorable lap dogs and fleshy nudes cavorting in unconvincing landscapes.

Pierre Auguste Renoir - Bathers - 1918-19

Pierre Auguste Renoir - After the Bath - 1910=12

Pierre Auguste Renoir - La Toilette - 1888

Pierre Auguste Renoir - The Judgement of Paris - 1908

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) also labored to maintain a commitment to a modern idiom, in his case an expressionist mode of representation.  Critical to an expressionist approach is intuition and spontaneity, the artwork becoming a direct, unfiltered, emotional response to visual subject matter, and, at his best, Kirchner outshines his contemporaries in readily accessing an internal cache of associations and reactions to subject matter and finding a unique, personal language to convey his perspective to his audience.  Unfortunately, Kirchner became somewhat unhinged after his military service during WWI and a period of drug addiction.  He was, simply put, physically and mentally depleted, and his paintings suffered.  Now hard-edged outlines, permitting no ambiguity or interpenetration, contained discrete forms.  Color was applied in large flat unnuanced zones.  The paintings no longer result from spontaneity and improvisation; they become leaden.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Albert Mueller and his Wife - 1925-26

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Ballspielerinnen - 1931-32

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - Kopf des Malers (Selbstbildnis) - 1925

Artists at times become so focused on technique that all other concerns diminish in comparison.  Balthus (1908-2001) had established himself as an artist by creating images charged with a powerful sexual urgency that, on occasion, startled and disturbed his audience.  His early work displays remarkable invention and a catlike sense of balance.  At midcareer, surface texture became important to him, and the resulting paintings are absolute jewels, testifying to the laborious application of countless layers of paint while still retaining the freshness and spontaneity of a study.  Much to the detriment of his paintings, he eventually became obsessed with surface texture, an obsession that overshadowed all other aesthetic concerns in his work.  The resulting work is flat, static and awkward.

Balthus - Girl at a Window - 1957

Balthus - Large Landscape with a Tree - 1957

Balthus - The Moth - 1960

I should note before moving on that fortunately Balthus experienced a personal renaissance at the end of his career, generating work that retained a focus on surface while embracing a new form of imagery inspired by Eastern Art.

I’m not so sure why I started this entry by addressing artists who early on successfully transitioned into an innovative approach to representation but later on in their careers questioned their convictions or lost the fortitude to maintain that approach.  Probably the opposite was most commonly the case.  Artists, experimenting in technique or developing a new aesthetic, often produce unsatisfying work early on in their careers.

For instance, while Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) struggled to shed the discipline imposed in the creation of representational imagery, Lucian Freud (1922-2011) hesitated to permit himself the luxury of depicting form and space illusionistically, retaining modernist elements like distortion and flattening of volume in his early work.  While moving in opposite directions aesthetically, both artists managed to create representational images that were noncommittal, awkward and frankly embarrassing.

Jackson Pollock - Going West - 1934-35

Jackson Pollock - Woman - 1930

Lucian Freud - Gerald Wilde - 1943

Lucian Freud - Girl in a Dark Sweater - 1947

Lucian Freud - Stephen Spender - 1940

Though he wasn’t striving to radically change the manner in which imagery is presented, Francisco Goya (1746-1828) struggled to master basic techniques of representation in his first years working as an artist.  His early paintings resemble folk art produced by untrained amateurs.  His figures are stiff.  They don’t seem to breathe and have blood flowing through their veins.  The clothing they wear is elaborately painted in great detail, but volume is unconvincingly presented.  There doesn’t appear to be a light source, and no body of flesh and blood defines the fabric’s folds and creases.  When the figure is presented in an outdoor setting, the landscape is poorly painted and reads more like the flat backdrops used in early Hollywood movies.

Francisco Goya - Don Manuel Osorio - 1987-88

Francisco Goya - The White Duchess - 1795

Francisco Goya - Jose Costa y Bonells - c1810

Sometimes the tastes of the era in which an artist lives can compel him or her to produce work that today makes us cringe in discomfit.  For instance, after the Napoleonic Wars, Europe became obsessed with the exotic.  France, in particular, having been introduced to Islamic culture during its military forays into Egypt and Syria, embraced a distorted Orientalism based on a surface level appreciation of the customs and mores of a hitherto inaccessible people.  Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) provided for a public hungry for romantic escapism images of enticing odalisques ensconced in a sultan’s harem and turbaned warriors armed with bejeweled scimitars and mounted on fiery steeds.  Today, as accomplished as these works clearly are, they disturb us because they are founded on a sentiment of national chauvinism and offer a vision of a rich and diverse culture based on prurient and vapid stereotypes.

Eugene Delacroix - The Women of Algiers - 1834

Eugene Delacroix - Tiger Hunt - 1854

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - Le Grande Odalisque - 1814

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres - The Little Bather in the Harem - 1828

The Victorian Era seems to be a period of conflicting motivations.  While the most powerful European nations vied shamelessly to accumulate territorial possessions and subdue and oppress indigenous populations… while rapacious industrial entities blindly exploited generations of poor and ignorant workers, in educated and privileged circles the highest moral ideals were purported.  In England, perhaps the most successful and egregious beneficiary of colonial and capitalist opportunity at that time, these ideals were pushed to an extreme, creating a milieu defined by a saccharine sentimentality and a rigid code of morality.  At the height of the Victorian Era, a loose group of English artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites shared an interest in medieval art, rejecting comfortable visual conventions long established since the Renaissance.  They promoted personal invention, attention to detail throughout a composition and the use of bright colors as favored particularly in Quattrocento Italian art.  To some degree, the Pre-Raphaelites revitalized representational art.  But though their images were unquestionably admirable and accomplished, they were often hampered by the expectations and restrictions of the prevailing zeitgeist of their day.  Often their images are painfully sweet and sentimental or exhibit a patriotic or racial bias which today is difficult to stomach.  Though a good many of their images are erotically charged, to avoid offending the prevailing code of morality, nudity and sexuality had to be addressed within a historic, religious or mythological context – creating a weirdly disturbing paradigm.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Beloved - 1865-66

Ford Madox Brown - The Last of England - 1855

William Holman Hunt - Isabella and the Pot of Basil - 1868

William Holman Hunt - The Awakening Conscience - 1853

John Collier - Lady Godiva - c1897

Edward Poynter - Diadumene - 1883

So unsuccessful artwork can result from a variety of causes: the inevitable experimentation that occurs when pushing into unchartered territory, the inability to sustain a radical stance within one’s output, the imbalance that occurs when technical innovation dominates all other concerns for the artist or the embracing of (or succumbing to) the tastes, predilections and moral codes of contemporary society – no matter how untenable or extreme those influences are.  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), arguably the greatest innovator within the history of art, having reinvented painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics in his lifetime, was riddled with self-doubt and at times thought himself a clown pandering to the caprices of his age.

In art, the mass of people no longer seek consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous.  I myself - since Cubism and before - have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities that have passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me.  By amusing myself with these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly.  And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches.  And today - as you know - I am celebrated, I am rich.  But when I am alone with myself, I do not have the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term.  Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, they were great painters.  I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited - as best he could - the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries.  Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere,

                                      - Pablo Picasso, Interview with Giovanni Papini, 1952

It's distressing to read these words of Picasso and recognize that in spite of his unfathomable accomplishments he was still beset with insecurities.  It makes his struggles all the more heroic that he was never sure if his efforts were in any way worthwhile.  Picasso put himself out there.  And I guess that's what this entry is really about.

Perhaps surprisingly, a good many of the artists featured in this entry (an entry which exposes images I find aesthetically unsatisfying or contextually embarrassing) are among those I most admire - artists that I've researched in print and online - those for whom, when featured in a show or exhibition, I'll get motivated to visit a gallery or museum.  But then again, this observation probably isn't that surprising.  Let's circle back to the assertion with which I opened this entry: that meaningful communication is impossible without exposure.  I believe this applies to whether one's painting a masterpiece or having a chat with the barista at Starbucks.  So I have a piece of friendly advice to my readers today: Be the fool!

As always I encourage my readers to comment here, but if you would prefer to comment privately, you may email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.

Entry - 9.13.14

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle - 2014

Finishing a painting these days always generates conflicting emotions in me.  Of course, there is a sense of satisfaction, relief that the project undertaken is complete.  And it is always interesting to see the finished work (when the last stone is set, so to speak), and I can evaluate how far from my initial concept I have strayed.   On the other hand, there are a number of formidable negatives too.  At this stage in my career, I tend to work on my larger paintings for quite a few months, so, upon nearing completion, I get somewhat weary of the image.  At some point, I usually become inured to the emotional content of the work and concern myself primarily with tackling technical issues.  So when I step back from a newly finished work, I have trouble experiencing it fully.  Often it can take years from completion before I can really “see” one of my paintings.  Also, finishing a work always brings up the discomforting question of what to do next.  Even if I have a firm concept in my mind of my next image (which commonly is not the case), I must still address the issues of locating models, purchasing and hauling supplies and preparing a canvas.  And although the initial phases of creating a work (making preparatory sketches, determining the composition, transferring my drawings to the canvas and blocking in the underpainting) are stimulating, the experience can also be intense and stressful.  Hence, finishing a painting does not represent a fulfilling climax for me… most probably, simply a resigned moving-on.

My latest work, Cat’s Cradle, took nearly two years to complete, longer by far than any previous work.  I experienced a couple of major disruptions during the painting of this work but nothing so cataclysmic as to justify the time spent in its execution.  Life does seem to be incredibly complex these days, often exigent demands imposing restrictions on the amount of time I get to spend in my studio.  And I don’t possess the stamina that I used to.  Regularly I could feel “maxed out” after a three hour painting session.  As I appreciated that I was approaching the two year mark on this work, I recognized I had to kick up my performance a notch or two and began adding after work sessions to my schedule.  Lastly, I can assuage my conscience a bit with the consideration that this composition was extremely complex and presented a number of unique technical difficulties for me.  But, all said, I do recognize that I must organize my days more effectively and push myself to extend the length of my studio sessions beyond my current norm.

Every painting presents its unique challenges.  Though I try to control most aspects of my paintings, I find that unexpected circumstances often lead to unplanned results.  Once a woman who was to model for me asked me the day before what she should wear to our session.  I replied that she could wear anything except black.  Of course, she came the following day in a pitch black, long-sleeved top.  Another time I asked a model not to wear anything patterned, and he arrived in an intricately patterned, plaid flannel shirt.  I’ve arrived at locations to find that the available space will not allow me to position myself at the anticipated angle in relation to the scene, requiring ad hoc compositional adjustments.  Or I discover that my model simply cannot strike the pose or express the emotions I desire.  Sometimes the unpredictable actually enhances a painting, forcing me out of my comfort zone and challenging me to develop innovative solutions.  At other times, these irregularities can detract from the final image.

I always come to a modeling session with a pretty firm concept in mind.  I know the role each model will play and the specific pose I will ask him or her to take.  I possess a fairly detailed concept of the layout of the surroundings, the placement of any props to be used and my positioning in relation to the models.  When I arrived at the location at which I was to shoot my “source photographs” for Cat’s Cradle, the models were dressed appropriately and were fully capable of holding the poses and expressing the emotions I requested of them.  The space was sufficient to permit me to light my subjects correctly and take my pictures from the angle that I had anticipated.  What did surprise me was finding a colorful and intricately patterned quilt draped over the sofa on which my models were to be posed.  At first, I thought of removing it but then reconsidered.  I realized that the quilt could play a pivotal role in the painting, that my challenge would be to depict the quilt convincingly without permitting it to overwhelm the composition.  I generally like to position my figures within austere spaces (in front of a bare, white wall, seated on a solid toned chair or sofa, enveloped in darkness, etc.), so addressing a composition that would be active all over and brightly colored incited me to employ new solutions.

I immediately thought of works executed in the international style during the late gothic period – paintings, in particular, that captured the cosmopolitan pageantry of European courtly life.  Commonly, these paintings and murals were large in scale, crowded with activity and executed in great detail.  The costumes of the individuals portrayed in these works were sophisticated and richly patterned.  Every inch of these images was infused with energy, often even the sky being occupied with colorful flags and banners or a mesh of jumbled lances.  Figures, all evenly lit and carefully delineated, are gathered in massive clots that fill vast expanses of the picture plane.  A good many of the paintings I’ve seen that were executed in this style strike me as awkward, having no discernible focus point or unified composition.  Complex patterns clash and overlap arbitrarily.  But I don’t believe that these works are necessarily unsuccessful; the intentions of the artists differed from those of post-renaissance artists.  Rather than seek to develop a unified composition with organized movement within areas of non-activity, these artists sought to provide persistent overall detail that would impress and delight an audience regardless of viewing angle.  These paintings were public declarations of the wealthy and powerful patrons who commissioned them.  It was critical that they confirm the status and sophistication of their owners.  And wherever you were seated in a banqueting room or at what point you stood in a reception hall, upon turning to examine the mural beside you, you should find within the larger composition a charming vignette to captivate and entertain you.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti - Allegory of Good and Bad Government - 1337

Paolo Uccello - The Battle of San Romano - 1438 to 40

Pisanello - The Vision of St. Eustace -1438 to 42

Simone Martini - Maestra - 1315

By the way, the onset of the renaissance did not bring about the complete demise of the overall composition.  Particularly within the modern and postmodern modes, artists, breaking away from long established conventions, have successfully utilized overall compositions.

Max Beckmann - Die Nacht - 1918 to 19

Jackson Pollock - Number 1, 1949 - 1949

Janet Fish - Green Glass from Alexis - 2001

So, my challenge was to embrace an overall composition, one that convincingly represented the form and patterning of the sofa and quilt, without interfering with the primacy of the figures or obscuring the thrusts of movement their forms suggest.  I accomplished this by pushing the tones in the quilt slightly to the blue and diminishing (again just slightly) contrast in the background elements, while emphasizing contrast and warm tones in the figures.  This may sound fairly elemental, but it took me some time and a couple of sessions of repainting to work out.  Contrary to my usual practices, I also elected to use a heightened palette with Cat’s Cradle.  This was determined, to some degree arbitrarily, by the chance circumstances of what I found upon arriving for my shoot.  But once I determined that I would be addressing an overall composition, it seemed natural to permit the work to drift a bit to the decorative.  And it certainly felt right to portray two lovely, adolescent girls using a cheerful array of pigments.  I think that the final work arrived at a satisfying balance between overall activity and traditional composition… between the decorative and the austere… between the attractive and the profound.

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

Gerard Wickham - Cat's Cradle (detail) - 2014

I’m not going to analyze the painting here, touching on how it functions and suggesting possible interpretations of the imagery.  Having tried this many times in the past, I’ve learned that any attempt to guide a viewer to a more thorough grasp of one of my works only leads to misunderstanding and obfuscation, whatever observations I provide becoming gospel and the artwork being transformed into an illustration of my words.  I will only say that in creating this work my intention was to please and delight the eye; I hope that in doing so I haven’t trespassed into the saccharine.

Please feel free to comment here.  If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com. 

Entry - 7.31.13

After writing my entry on self- portraits, I thought it might be interesting to look at a few self-portraits of a different variety, photographs of artists at work.  Now, of course, I recognize that these images are not valid “self-portraits”, having been recorded by another individual holding the camera, but I am certain that the artist determined the circumstances of the shoot, was aware at all times of the location of the photographer and vigilantly censored what information was divulged during the session.  Artists, being magicians of sorts, very often guard carefully the secrets behind creating their illusions.  Several times, I’ve requested of artist friends the opportunity to watch them paint, hoping to add some new technique to my bag of tricks or to learn how they achieved a certain effect.  I’ve been universally turned down.  I can understand why.  The breakthroughs I’ve achieved on canvas have been few and resulted from hard labor and time-consuming experimentation.  There would be a natural reluctance to share information exposing process or technique.  Anyway, I am sure that an established artist would have a multitude of reasons for wanting to control what photographs of him or her at work reveal, which makes these images all the more interesting.

 

Ferdinand Hodler

It’s easy to forget when viewing an artwork how much effort went into its creation.  Here we see Ferdinand Hodler dealing with logistics.  He wants to present his model in a very specific place, in a garden lit by filtered sunlight, but he also wants to be far enough away from her that perspective distortion will be minimal.  At the same time, he wishes to portray his model framed by a solid white background, which would affect the reflected light on her flesh and clothing.   To achieve these goals, Hodler ends up working pressed up against a gateway with his canvas balanced off kilter before him.  A canvas back is placed behind the model to create the appropriate lighting.  It’s clear that for this artist it is essential to work from the live model in natural lighting, evidence of the prevailing influence of the prior generation of plein air painters.

 

Ferdinand Hodler

 

 

Even in his later years, Hodler still painted outdoors in the winter, which had to be extremely uncomfortable.  Notice that he wears no glove on his painting hand.  There’s another photo of him (which I do not include here) loading his paint box and canvas onto a small sled which he intends to pull through the snow to the locale where he will work that day.  His commitment to painting on location in natural light had to be extreme.

 

Pablo Picasso

What stands out in this photo of Pablo Picasso at work is his intensity.  His concentration is so focused that his black eyes set in those protruding facets seem to burn a hole in the canvas.  It’s not that surprising that Picasso often painted those eyes on his models.  After all, most commonly an artist will learn to paint the human form by turning to his most readily available subject: himself.  And, I think that appropriation or possession was a primary motive for Picasso in painting, particularly when his subject was a woman.  What better way to achieve this intellectual violation than to merge his features with those of his sitter.

Jackson Pollock

Helen Frankenthaler

 
Once artists abandoned representational imagery, it was only a matter of time before they put aside their easels and brushes.  Abstraction seemed to demand size, and stretching huge canvases presents many problems for an artist involving cost, portability and storage.  Certainly many an artist has worked on unstretched canvas pinned to a vertical wall, but abstraction sought unique solutions especially since “paint” became the sole subject matter.  Naturally, artists strove to find new ways to use paint, and eventually gravity came to play a major role in how images were created, whether it is Jackson Pollock dripping, splattering and swirling paint on a horizontal canvas or Helen Frankenthaler allowing thinned paints to run and blend down a tilted expanse of unprimed canvas.

Fairfield Porter

 

 I couldn’t resist throwing in this photograph of Fairfield Porter at work with his young children swarming about his feet.  It reminds us of the challenge an artist faces in balancing the demands of his personal life with those of his creative life.  Sometimes it feels like every time I plan on spending a full day in my studio either the plumbing springs a leak or there’s a piano recital to attend or the dog will utterly lose his mind if he doesn’t get taken for a long walk.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol broke so many rules.  Most people know that he took commercial consumer art and elevated it to high art.  He also performed a similar transformation on ubiquitous celebrity tabloid imagery.  I think Warhol recognized that the commercial marketplace changed the way the viewer took in visual emblems and that repetitive exposure to imagery reduced visual experience to the subliminal.  It’s hard to say how Warhol felt about this, whether he condemned it or relished it (probably a bit of both), because he refused to play the role of the serious artist proselytizing a pop-art credo.  Commonly when posed questions about his art during interviews, he would pretend to be surprised by the interviewer’s observations and admit that he was a complete fraud who hadn’t a clue to what he was doing.  Though he wanted to be as hollow as the imagery he produced, his brilliance and wit were obvious.  As part of his de-sanctification of art, he turned the act of creation into a process of mass production, using readily available photographic imagery and techniques of replication like screen printing to make multiple editions of his work.

Lucian Freud

I’ve seen many pictures of Lucian Freud at work and I’ve always noted how utilitarian and efficient was his approach to painting.  Of course, because the painting was the focus of his efforts, he tended to let subordinate matters run a bit chaotic.  Freud liked to regularly wipe his brush clean while working.  Here he wears an apron that functions as a place to deposit gobs of discarded paint.  In many photos, we can see that he’s hung a large square of cloth on the wall to serve the same purpose.

Odd Nerdrum

 

 

I really enjoy this picture of the contemporary Norwegian artist, Odd Nerdrum, at work, particularly because he is as much a work of art as his painting.  With his unruly hair and a garb of animal furs and antiquated puffed sleeves, a red blotchy rash covering his neck and cheek, he could easily have stepped out of one of his own post-apocalyptic paintings.  Shown smearing paint with his bare figure, he seems to merge with the image on which he works.

Jenny Saville

When I saw this photograph of Jenny Saville poised amidst a plethora of source material, I thought it was the perfect image of the post-modern artist, who often surveys very diverse and seemingly unrelated materials in creating an image.  Once the isms had run their course, contemporary artists were reluctant to embrace any particular philosophy or manifesto and naturally art became more eclectic, borrowing at will from any variety of periods and styles, turning to an infinite array of resources such as medical journals, cartoons, porn, fashion imagery, graffiti and advertising.

 

 

When watching movies about artists, I’m always amused to see how little screen time is devoted to showing the artist at work.  Scenes of drunken debauchery in bars are most popular, with excursions to brothels running a close second.  There may be a little romance, rivalry, starvation, depravity, depression, addiction or suicide tossed in for flavoring.  But we most certainly do not want to see a painter painting when we visit our local movie theater.  The fact is that no one can master any art form without devoting endless hours of labor to his or her craft.  The real drama in an artist’s life occurs at the easel struggling with his media, coming to impasses and making choices as to how to proceed, experimenting and taking risks technically, and, occasionally, achieving minor victories along the way.  This brings to mind a quote from Gustav Klimt: “There is nothing that special to see when looking at me.  I’m a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening – figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits”.  I’ll often leave my studio after hours of work feeling like I have accomplished nothing and will need to address the same area on another day.  There are also times when I finish my day’s work feeling exhilarated, unable to focus on other activities or conversation.  But, whatever has transpired in my studio that day, I always exit knowing that I’ve been working hard, that I’ve had to push my level of concentration up several notches in the process.  That’s the reality of painting.  The real drama takes place in the studio.  On the other hand, I must grant some latitude to screenwriters and directors; most folk would be bored to stupefaction watching a movie that seriously addresses the labor involved in creation.

 

This photo doesn’t actually qualify as an image of an artist at work, but I include it because it documents the place where I created most of my artwork during my student years.  I lived and painted in the unheated basement of my parents’ home.  Two hopper windows, located at opposite ends of a very long room covered in dark paneling, permitted a modicum of natural light to penetrate the space, but the only legitimate source of light were two ceiling fixtures of fluorescent bulbs that hummed and flickered when turned on.  I didn’t mind the temperature (I had an electric space heater that took the edge off during the winter months), but the lighting frustrated the hell out of me.  So, whenever I got the chance, I would emerge from the basement and set up my easel in the kitchen where there was an acceptable mix of natural and florescent light.  Of course, painting in the kitchen meant having to deal with occasional traffic to and from the refrigerator, stove and sink, but I didn’t mind it.  Believe it or not, I look back on those days fondly.

On vacation, I would always try to do some painting, usually tackling a landscape or two.  Here I am at Moosehead Lake, a very isolated location in Northern Maine only accessible by boat or rugged dirt roads which were maintained by a paper company.  I found a spot on the path that followed the edge of the lake where a line of birch trees formed a screen through which the reflected light off the lake was filtered.  I unfolded my easel right there and set to work.

 

 

An image of me preparing a canvas in our apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.  At that time, I used rabbit skin glue sizing and applied an oil-based gesso ground with a trowel.

In our apartment in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, my wife and I maintained a large room to use as a studio… well, at least until we had children, Here I am seen painting First Light, a breakthrough work for me.

 

I thought it would be good to include a current photo of me at work.  We now live about sixty miles north of NYC in a sprawling, ramshackle house on two acres of mostly wooded land.  I have a studio to myself whose dimensions slowly shrink as finished paintings get stacked along the periphery of the room.  This past weekend, I took this picture of me working on my latest painting, a work to which I’ve already devoted months of labor and anticipate devoting several more.  Though it’s a complex piece that has presented me with many challenges, I am really enjoying the painting and feel, relatively, in control of the process.

 

Living in an era when a host of innovations have radically changed the way that art is produced, I must confess that to paint at an easel with brushes at this time is somewhat ridiculous.  After Pablo Picasso and Kurt Schwitters incorporated collage in their paintings… after Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler removed the canvas from its stretchers, laid it on the ground and dripped or poured paint on it… after Andy Warhol produced multiple copies of photo-emulsion screen printed images, it seems antiquated and obtuse to return to traditional easel painting.  My motives for returning to traditional methods of painting are varied.  I do not see myself as a guardian of ancient knowledge… you know, something akin to those Japanese “Living National Treasures” who sustain techniques and skills established by artists and artisans centuries ago.  In fact, most of my painting processes have been developed on my own, as I received my formal training at a time when innovation and experimentation were so stressed that teachers were reluctant to provide technical instruction.  So my paintings tend to look a bit odd or out-of-place beside traditional paintings.  Maybe I’ll go into that subject in more detail in the future.

 

I like limitations and structure.  Working at an upright canvas on an easel provides that.  Sometimes, in my painting I impose restrictions on myself that force me to invent, to innovate, to solve technical problems.  For instance, while an undergrad at Stony Brook, I painted an entire painting using a toothpick to apply paint.  I wanted to explore how far I could go in addressing detail.  Or, in the 1990’s, I spent nearly two years painting only frontal heads on small canvases.  My goal was to so limit composition and subject matter that I would be forced to make the paint the primary source of drama.  For many years now, easel painting has provided a consistent framework for my explorations.  Also, at present, I am committed to depicting recognizable imagery, particularly that of the figure, because I am obsessed with the narrative, an obscure suggestion of a story that offers no dependable resolution.

 To comment privately, you can email me at: gerardwickham@gmail.com.