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.
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.