Some thoughts out of the blue, and the sky

I love skies in March and early April. The air still has a crisp clear of winter. But big boozy clouds of summer start to muscle around up there. Rolling. Growing. Blowing. There’s action in these skies. They change, often strikingly, and fast. 

Recently I was getting over a sinus infection. I was tired and achy in the studio. So I took a few to zen back, stare at half finished paintings, and doze off. But cars kept going by. You know how it can be, they just kept bugging me. I tried to relax. I put on music. Tried some meditation. Maybe it just wasn't going to happen. But then, one car somehow sounded like an ocean wave. And then the next sounded like a wave. And so on. Soon I was listening to rolling waves, and I could rest. 

I got to wondering where sounds go after we hear them. Where does music go inside you? Where do the car/waves go? And where did they come from? They’re in there somewhere. I'm not talking neurologically, or of narrative memory. Where poetically are they? They must become part of you. If you are what you eat, are you not also what you hear? There’s calories to food, sure, you’re physically built of it. But there’s also the intimacy of eating. The taste, the sacrament, the expression of the food. That also becomes you. And, isn't that something like art? 

We can consume art like food. When you really get looking at a piece of art, digging it and vibing with it, you get a feeling like ingesting it. You know and remember a great piece as an affection within yourself. Absorb great artworks, and they are you. 

I find it noticeable with places. If you have some Hopper paintings in you, it's somewhat impossible to head out Cape Cod without feeling his Truro scenes. Scott Noel paintings breathe Philadelphia in summertime. Tom Birkner’s breathe New Jersey. If you travel to the Brandywine Valley, PA, you intuitively know when you're in Wyeth magic.

In things. Spend time with John Chamberlain or David Smith sculptures, and it's pretty hard to walk by a scrap metal pile without seeing the magic they felt.  A bakery case is a Wayne Thiebaud picture. See spiraled orange or lemon peels, and you’re in a 17th century Dutch still life. My kids scribble on the little toy blackboard, and I see the magic of Raymond Saunders.

To me, Cape Ann, MA, is Winslow Homer and Milton Avery. But it's also John Updike. All variety of arts can get in you and then stew up. It's great. Richard Estes paintings meet the Beastie Boys for New York City summer. Read Hemingway passages about food, and see table still lifes by Picasso or Cezanne. In the opening chapters of Heart of Darkness you get the Thames of Whistler, Grimshaw, and Turner. Eastertime can be Michelangelo's Pieta, also Jesus Christ Superstar, and Godspell, and throw in some Mary Cassatt and some Virginia Woolf. 

Taking art this way is not like recognizing realistic representations of scenes out in the world. It's how artists tap notions you have deep within. That which you aren’t immediately or oftenly aware. Cars can sound like waves. Artists find intangible things to help share vision. If they’re really good, they may even do it preemptively. I say, great artists tell the future. During the past few months with the hubbub about Chinese spy balloons, everything looked like the wonderful and eerie balloon paintings by Michael Andrews.

I’m sure there are volumes to write on art viewpoints in our individual and/or collective psyches. I can handle it if I think a little smaller. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, our birthing coach gave me great advice. She said we are responsible for ourselves (our physical bodies and thoughts, emotions, etc.), and we are also responsible for the aura in several feet of space around us. It transfers to others. The mood, the attitude, your condition: it rubs off. She was teaching me how to calm my wife through the birthing process. But I’ve found it's life advice, and useful when looking at art. The artist and viewer share the aura around each piece. 

If you're a chef, you want to make food nourishing not just for nutrition, but for the spirit. And, you’re responsible for what you feed to people. The same can be true of an artist. The art you make gets in people. Care for it, care for them. 

And, well, like there’s lots of crappy food out there, there’s crappy art out there too (Boring knock offs. Zombie formalism. Pictures for pictures sake, often pretty cheesy. And, ‘conceptual art’ with no real concept). Any which way, you end up with a stomach ache. 

Akin, some art tries to be too nutritious. Teach you too much. Teach you how you ‘should’ behave. Try to prove something, or maybe just prove the artist is clever, sophisticated, or discerning somehow. Maybe useful sometimes? But you don’t really eat medicine. You don't chew your pills for the taste.

Good food is beneficial, because it sticks to your bones and makes you feel well. Good art sticks with you, forms you, and firms you. Visiting art is healthy, but you don't do it for your health. The benefits come in communion. Great works touch you, they may make you happy, and they surely make your life richer. They help to hint how you are in the world. 

People visit us here in South Jersey. Sometimes, they’ll say how, on getting near, everything starts feeling like Ted Walsh paintings. My wife, Kay, was one of these people. She talks about fist coming around and seeing my paintings in the land around her. Says she recognized it right away. I love this stuff. I can even be bashful with pride when I hear it. It's delightful when people see something in your work.

I don't know, I stare at my paintings so long and so often, they can just start to look like nothing to me. But maybe, there’s something in this. A lot of my landscapes are just made up from my head. What am I really depicting? I like to think, if I do my job, I’ll get to things people truly clasp. It’s fun to think so, anyway. Maybe visually. Maybe in subject. Maybe just a vibe. To me, a great painting is one you can look at and purely know. Before you have to explain why, you know it as you’d know anything deep in there.

Not long ago Kay and I were driving where Salem and Cumberland Counties meet. A beautiful part of NJ. It’s where the inner coastal plain, (along the Delaware River), meets the outer coastal plain (a lot of pineland). The land changes there. The hills flatten out. The soil gets sandy. The weather gets maritime influence from the Jersey Shore. Often big bright inland skies become a little grayer and a little wetter. We watched the weather change, and we watched the spring skies get dramatic.

Around us, the landscape looked like our paintings. Kay points it out. Ted pictures. Big action filled skies, over simple farmhouses, and barns. Windows and birds. And the sun shining between/through clouds, cutting shapes of shadow and light on walls.

Most of the time, when you see something of beauty, you can’t drop everything and paint the picture right there. But, I guess, maybe you can anticipate the picture. There’s a glimpse. A, kind of, flash of meditation. I think it’s related to how the things you see become a part of you. There’s that magic…well, it's not so easy to construe. It’s similar to the sense you get when looking at a great art work. It’s something like, you know there’s a whole macrocosm within that microcosm, and you know you now have it all within you. 

You are what you eat, and you are what you hear, and you are what you see, and that's pretty cool.

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I often look at artworks, and can pretty quickly tell how they're made. It's one of the great joys of being a painter. It's illuminating and fulfilling to walk through museums and know what great artists years ago, or in far flung places were up to. But, I find, some of my favorite artworks are ones I can't quite figure out. 

This is why I love Alex Griffin's paintings. They're somewhat elusive. You can look closely, or again and again, and still be a little stumped about how he puts them together. They're deep. They're affectionate. They're puzzling. And they're lovely. 

Alex has a solo show at Nancy Margolis Gallery, up until February 17th. Here’s the blurb from their website:
“In his second solo exhibition with Nancy Margolis Gallery, Philadelphia artist Alex Griffin conjures impressions of distant memories and dreamstates. Quiet figures hover weightlessly within gauzy landscapes that oscillate between solid and transparent areas of paint. The times of day are intentionally ambiguous, but recall in-between states, similar to twilight or the dim glow of midwinter. Heightening the aura of mystery, Griffin evokes timelessness by concealing the narratives’ physical locations and precise moments in history.”

You can see the paintings in a first-rate viewing room on the gallery site. There are images, info, and some nice detail shots of the paintings’ surfaces. These surfaces, the small and subtle details and textures are some of the most charming bits of Griffin’s painting.

He lays his paint with variation. In areas the pigment is thin and scrubbed. Other areas have thick luscious dollops of paint. There are candid scratches and scribbles throughout. Small features, figures, shrubs, moons, birds etc. doodled into the paint before it dried. All laid in with ruthless intimacy.

Each scene feels like something you remember, but are also seeing for the first time. Griffin abstracts scenes in ways that make you feel like you’re seeing multiple things at once. They’re kind of like storybook pictures. Deep spaces are foreshortened, and feel no deeper than the picture plane. He presents perspective with guilelessness. In a good way, the pictures feel childlike. Honest and natural they seem composed by intuition. Objects and figures float. Birds may fly around at the bottom of a picture. Things like windows, ladders, fences or chairs may wander into the picture wherever your eye happens to meander.

Hazy with patches of blue and brown Midwinter is both joyful and quiet. It feels like short winter days when dusk comes just at the end of afternoon and buildings quickly change from structures to silhouettes. Daubs of white paint polka dot the sky. The orbs of white light flutter in the tree branches over a little winter village. Memories of winter, maybe Christmas, from childhood or a dream. Scenes that float around in the back of your vision, very familiar but ungrounded from a comprehensive report.

Agatha’s Dream is a play set. It's among a few scenes in this show portraying theaters or stages. Agatha’s Dream has a figure in a pink dress and a house, some trees, and stars in the sky. The dream emerges through sleep’s gauzy veil like a scene from behind a theater curtain. It starts somewhat devoid of context, but you're drawn precisely because there are more questions than answers. 

If Agatha’s Dream is a simple mystery, maybe Agatha Christie, than A Gathering is David Lynch. A Gathering is also set in a theater-like structure. A square of black, specked with stars,  borders three sides of the composition and frames the scene. A Gathering is not as homey as Midwinter or Agatha's Dream. A pointy animal faced figure looms above another vague animal shape, maybe a wolf. A man and women hold hands beneath a gothic looking window. It’s all fenced in behind a small row of shrubs, and under a clouded night sky.  

Afterglow is a landscape that vibrates with purple and pink. There are twos in this picture. Two tall green trees. Two flying white birds. A stately building stands mid picture with a glowing white circle, a clock tower. It's countered by a round moon in the sky to the upper right. A ghostly plume of smoke rises from a chimney, while a ghostly blear that seems ground into the painting’s surface emanates from the building’s roof. 

There are also some paintings on cigar boxes in this show. These are a treat. The best expressionistic paintings are undergirded by a kind of urgency of passion. I feel it in these. They’re not necessarily fast paintings. Rather they’re paintings of outpouring. Heartfelt outpouring. They’re blind to pretense. The expression is foremost, and the highbrow comes later. It’s an accomplishment to be appreciated. Sometimes found object pieces and colloquial motifs can feel a bit ingenuine. Not the case with these cigar box paintings. They feel wholeheartedly unfeigned, and they’re materially lovely.

Interestingly the earnest childlike charm of Alex’s paintings turns grandfatherly on the cigar boxes. Like, maybe, a great grandfather who  tools away putting together tenderhearted little objects: these seem like pictures humans have been painting forever. Wonderfully humble. He quietly glimpses his love. She’s briefly silhouetted by winter's light, and he is struck by her beauty. He scratches it down with whatever things are at hand. Or he sees some foxes on a snowy ridge, and does the same. There's a sense these kinds of things, heartfelt artfully made objects, are simply timeless. Someone will always be there, seeing things and putting notions down in paint. Making art out of sentiment and intuition. Unassuming. And for this we can be thankful. 
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                                                                                                   Ted Walsh, Uncle's Farm, 2013

​His farm was one of my favorite places. No frills, and economical. Flat roofs, simple materials. Concrete, tar, sand. Efficient and orderly, but in no way fussed. His garage had a wall of huge north facing windows. He said it was the most efficient light to work by, and he got the windows for a good price.

He loved to paint things. Not pictures. He painted and repainted everything regularly to look clean and fresh. His palette was simple. Red, blue, yellow, black, and white. Real colors, primary colors, Mondrian colors. 

His house was red brick. All the farm buildings, painted fresh white. His new tractors were Ford and New Holland blue. The old tractors got rebuilt, and got fresh coats of whichever color was handy. He bought old army jeeps and rebuilt them as field vehicles. He painted the jeeps yellow top to bottom. Wheels, dash, seats, and all. His bicycle was yellow too. His canoe was red. He painted tools bright colors so he could find them if dropped in the field. And the whole farm was trimmed off in black. The farm bell outside his back door was shiney Rust-Oleum black. The roofs and driveway were black tar. 

He had an aesthetic. I don’t know if he’d have said much about it if you told him so, but it was palpable. You felt it. At his farm you were inside his mindset (I’ve had similar type feelings in Frank Lloyd Wright buildings).  

So, what to say about Mondrian paintings? I think maybe we don’t leave enough art alone. We couch it in pretext, and rationale. Useful sometimes certainly, but sometimes it's fun to clear your head and see if the work stands on its own. Let a Mondrian stand alone. Has he done the job? Is there something there?

I like it, but a lot of people would answer no. It’s just a bunch of squares and rectangles. And, well, they're kind of right. I can’t deny them. Tell them $51 million. You’ll hear you're outta your mind. But, Mondrian work is also iconic right? He’s a great. And, we really seem to like his stuff. There’s Mondrian swag. Underwear, home goods, toys. And, someone just paid $51 million for one. 

In Mondrian’s work, I think there may be something much more elemental. Like my uncle’s farm.  A guileless expression of belief. So, maybe I can’t bring myself to totally justify Mondrian’s work, but I’m also unwilling to dismiss it. 

As for $51 million. There's no doubt some artwork is absolutely priceless. Truly priceless. But Composition No. III, with red, blue, yellow, and black? Well, $51 million is a whole lot less than priceless. It could all be a sad moot point anyway. There’s a likelihood the painting sits in a private collection, and none of us will ever see it again.
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One is a hot summer picture, and the other is a brisk and windy picture, but Edward
​Hopper’s Summertime and New York Pavements are kindred paintings.

Don’t delay or stay too long, meet us at the break of dawn.

Sunrise by George Inness could be an off putting painting. It’s a hazy picture, made of orange, green, yellow, brown, and gray blears. But, while it’s somewhat ugly, it’s intriguing. It draws you in. You can feel the place in this landscape.

With this painting, you wake to early sun burning through morning mist. There is a kind of magic when you step outside to feel golden heat and cool vapor touch your skin at the same time. This painting sounds like Grieg’s Morning Mood, and the Adagio from Brahm’s Piano Conerto No. 1 playing simultaneously (Try giving it a listen, it’s more beautiful than you might expect).  How do you paint the ethereal? And then, how do you describe the painting of the ethereal?

George Inness' imagery is evanescent. You feel like you can’t quite see his pictures. They are dreamy, but they’re not frivolous. His compositions often feel as if they will fail at any moment. But, they don't. He painted tightly within the envelope of the given images, but also with freedom and expression. His pictures are often quite abstracted, but, to the gut, they never feel like anything but true to life. He disregarded painterly posturing, and instead favored his sense of honesty. They’re paintings about his expression, but they’re not paintings about him. His creations represent his awareness of collective sensations of people and their landscapes. With Sunrise Inness painted the practical, soily chlorophyll landscape. He also painted the screen of midsummer’s fairyland fog through which you see this landscape. 

This dawn has summer ghosts. A figure, in silhouette, makes his way through the landscape. Is it a plowman yawning as he begins a long day’s work? Or is it a puckish hobgoblin, yawning as he slips home after a long night of mischievous wandering? This dawn is a beginning scene, and an ending scene.

In parallel, the craft of this painting has productive divergence between its component parts. What you might at first see as disunion, resolves into well crafted harmony. This painting feels as if it were spilled rather than painted onto the canvas. But, it doesn’t feel thin or watery. Most of the picture is sufficiently built up. But it’s not built of dutifully alternated glazes and scumbles. When necessary to his vision, Inness freely toyed with painterly convention. His paintings have a vibe more than they have a beauty. In this painting, the careful gradient of light in the sky - orange to yellow to red - is reminiscent of the smooth color rich skys of the Hudson River School. But, in order to create morning mist, Inness painted a drab, gray wash over the bulk of the sky. He let only the brightest light of the sun burn through to become the focal point at the center of the picture. 

Blurry patches of greens roughly imply bushes, tree leaves, and banks of grass. Over these patches Inness laid gentle flutters of color to make more specific bits of foliage. For these, he simply touched the side of his brush to the surface, and let the bristles do the work. Inness’s creative mark making is compelling. In places he turned his brush around, and scribbled into the wet paint with the brush handle. For texture in the tree branches, he chicken scratched a dry scumble. But, for this scumble, instead of a local color in reference to the tree itself (i.e. the color of leaves or bark), Inness used the same warm tonal black that he used as a glaze throughout the rest of the picture. He simply varied his handling of the same paint for different effects. It’s the kind of efficient and painterly pluck you love to see in the work of a great painter.

In Sunrise, Inness adeptly handled the diverse components of his painting until they coalesced into a morning’s majesty. It's a visual epilogue that comes at the end of a midsummer’s night of dreams. So, “don’t delay or stay too long, meet us at the break of dawn.”

In John McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne, Blue and Gold, the orange/gold moon is a bit of design. It tangents the hazy horizon and offsets the understated monochrome composition. 
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Henri Rousseau also uses the moon as a light source. The Sleeping Gypsy has similarities to Wyeths Night Sleeper. The moon lights the scene brightly, and the gypsie‘s sack clothes remind me of the bag where Wyeth’s dog rests his head. The oddly placed elements in this composition make it feel like another dream you can't quite describe. 

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Francisco Goya makes the magic of the moon sinister in the Witch's Sabbath. This picture is painterly and brusque. Here the moon tells us it’s night more than it lights the scene. The witches gather around a cartoonishly disquieting goat as clumsy bats flap around his head. This is one of Goya’s many paintings of witches, the wicked, and the fiendish. There’s plenty here to make you double take. The melting faced figures offer babies and skeletal children to this nefarious coven. The roiling landscape appears to be either dead gray hills or an agitated gray sea. The moon is a dirty dash of white that hovers lazily above.

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Soon enough it all comes back together. There is a scene in It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is courting his love interest, Mary. He takes a walk, and finds himself at her house. On seeing his arrival she places a drawing she made onto her easel. It is a cartoon of George, and he’s lassoing the moon with a rope. George is a young man with big dreams. When he sees the drawing, George sees his life lay itself out before him. He’s terrified and in love. He realizes his love is reciprocated, and he realizes this love will overpower everything he's ever considered doing. They kiss passionately.


Circumstances have brought me to settle back in my hometown. It wasn’t necessarily a goal I had as a young man.Still, I'm happy. I’m married to the love of my life, and it seems like we keep having babies. When I was a kid I didn't like the scene of George, Mary, and her drawing. I don't think I fully knew what it meant. There was too much kissy stuff, and frankly his fear of future regret made me scared and worried. Now I love this scene, and I can't watch it without tearing up.

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On one poster for the Broadway show, Crazy for You, two lovebirds sit with arms around each other by the arch of a crescent moon. It's a great show with Gershwin music, and plenty of comedy. There's a dreamy song near the end called Nice Work If You Can Get It. When I'm feeling down, especially if I can't sleep at night, I listen to Nice Work If You Can Get It. It reminds me how much I love my family, and then I’m walking on the moon.




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I love looking at paintings. It’s high on the list of my favorite things to do. I love making paintings. It’s another of my favorite things. I also love writing about paintings. Of these three, I’ve professionally engaged with writing the least. There are probably a number of reasons for this. Some are good, and some are likely not so good. Maybe it's a lack of confidence. Sometimes I tell myself, I’ve been busy working on other parts of my creative process, and maybe this is true. Maybe it’s just been absent mindedness on my part. But recently I’ve had some requests to start a blog, and put my ideas about painting, art, etc. out there. Well here goes. 

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