Is It or Isn't It?

My friend Angela Woods posted the following on Facebook yesterday:

"I'm taking a business class, in my presentation I have to answer the question 'Why do we need to buy art?' Please comment 😊 I need feedback." Well, okay, Angela. If you want feedback, here's enough feedback to stuff a whale.

If this is a decent business class, my guess is that it's a trick question. Obviously we do not need to buy art. If we did, it wouldn't be so tough for a lot of people to sell their art.

The sentiment was expressed succinctly, chiseled on a block of granite which stands by the entrance to the Art Academy of Cincinnati: "ART IS NOT OPTIONAL". It sounds nice, but again, if art is not optional, why do most people fail to purchase it?

Pithy statements like ART IS NOT OPTIONAL thrive on undefined, or poorly-defined, terms, so let's look closer at the words "art" and "optional".

A lot of stuff gets called art. A few years back, an Art Academy student hung a dead fish on the wall, as her "conceptual drawing". It stank to high heaven. Was this art? If so, and if it is not optional, am I not obligated to hang a fish on my own wall, and everybody else's? Would a can of air freshener then also be not optional?

Is art anything that someone says is art?

Personally, I am hesitant to attempt to limit what can and cannot be called art. When I was a kid, my father took me to a design show at the Whitney, and he pointed out an Olivetti Underwood portable typewriter. I didn't get it. "Why is this here?"

"Because it's so beautiful," Pop explained.

But does it follow that because "art" is an elastic term, that anything I choose to call art is not optional for others? The perennial example is Andres Serrano's 1987 opus "Piss Christ" which I have decided not to post. But you've seen it, or heard of it. Is a photo of a crucifix in a jar of urine art? Is it optional?

Actually, we can answer that question. Whether "Piss Christ" is art, or good art, is beside the point. It is not optional. Mr. Serranno crafted his work of art while being supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. For every taxpayer, then, "Piss Christ" was not optional. I don't get to own it, or proudly display it in my living room, but I am compelled to support it. And perhaps this answers the question of what is art, as well. If art is not optional, then anything which I must support, by the edict of the police power of the state, is art. Conversely, anything which the state does not force me to support is not art.

Not a terribly compelling case. Bureaucrats have a ghastly track record for choosing what is and what is not art.

But if the state is not the sole arbiter of what is art and what is not art, or what is and what is not optional, then who is? And why is it necessary to tell other people what is and what is not optional? By my last count, the new Steven Spielberg film Ready Player One is his 34th feature. His work has garnered more than $10 billion in revenue. Did Spielberg place granite blocks in front of theaters reading "MOVIES ARE NOT OPTIONAL"? Why not?

In the late 1980s, I saw a sign in the window of a print shop which provided typesetting and other graphic services: "I HATE DESKTOP PUBLISHING." I guess everybody is entitled to his own opinion, but exactly why should I care what the owner of a print shop hates or doesn't hate? Around the same time, Richard Starkings and John Roshell were pioneering digital lettering for comic books, a technology which would shortly relegate my own profession as a hand letterer to the ash heap of history. Should I have explained to the world why I hated digital lettering? Again, who cares?

Need, and what is and is not optional, is defined by the individual. If I needed a blood transfusion to save my life, I would suggest that the transfusion was not optional. But some very committed Jehovah's Witnesses might beg to differ. Nor is my morning coffee optional, but try forcing that belief on a Mormon. One man's necessity is another man's option, and nobody is in a position to dictate what is and isn't optional, except the National Endowment for the Arts, and the government whose police power stands behind it.

I'd suggest that if my toilet was backing up, a good plumber would not be optional. Does this make a plumber an artist?

Wait. I said that nobody is in a position to dictate what is and what isn't optional, but that's not entirely true. Jesus Christ stated that "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Apparently, such words are not optional. And there you go. Such words are not only not optional, but some of us would claim that they are the highest form of Art ever fashioned,

How about that, Angela? Tell that to your business professor.

Into Every Life…

…a little rain must fall, as the saying goes.

Open air painting depends on what the atmosphere happens to be doing on a given day, and it's common to wait days, or occasionally years, for the conditions one wants to repeat themselves. I have a nice early November painting from last year which needs finishing, but I have to let it rest until early November.

Sometimes conditions are so fugitive that the effect that you started with is gone after a few minutes, and then you have to decide whether to paint what attracted you in the first place, or chase the new effect.

For example, almost exactly two years ago, I happened on a late April vista with hazy skies and saturated color. The weatherman said something about rain the next day, but things seemed clear and dry enough when I began.

So I went at it, using a small, failed canvas.

This was rubbed in over the course of forty minutes or so, but in that time, the skies were already changing.

Another half hour and I was able to begin refining shapes, particularly in the trees and bushes, But by this time the sky was really changing. Moisture in the air was beginning to lighten darks, darken lights, and bleed away saturated color. It was at this point that I figured you can't fight City Hall. I painted into the scene what now lay in front of me.

The more one loses contrast and saturation, the more the sense of moisture in the air is brought about. This wasn't an aesthetic or intellectual move on my part. I just copied what lay before me the best I knew how.

Come the end of the session it was beginning to drizzle. And my little pastoral scene had become a rainy day view. Corot made a fortune on vistas like this.

This sort of thing is the exact opposite of Robert Beverly Hale's concept of picture making, but Hale made no pretense of being a landscape painter. Although as the curator of American painting at the Metropolitan Museum, Hale must have been familiar with the great American impressionists: Metcalf, de Camp, Beaux, Twatchman, et al. He must have realized that none of these people could have approached painting with mass conceptions and conceived light.

Composition as Binary Code

Since we're on the subject of simplifying large quantities of detail into simple patches of color, let's take the subject a step further, and look at perhaps the ultimate degree of simplification. Here's our motif once more:

Tonally, this is a pretty simple composition already, with three or four simple areas of value. But it can be simplified further still:

Here, the image has been manipulated for maximum contrast. Everything is either pure white or pure black. This sort of simplification has been a fad in graphic design in various epochs; Peter Max made a career out of the schtick. Colonel Sanders' portrait on every KFC sign uses a similar trick.

Composition is more about areas of tone than lines, although the books one might have read on the subject might suggest otherwise. This sort of treatment pares a composition down to its least common denominator. Few photographs or painted images are good enough to withstand that sort of treatment. For example, our photograph only looks more vapid when so simplified.

But a well composed image will not only survive that kind of simplification, but will often look absolutely terrific. Compositionally, a high contrast treatment separates the men from the boys.

For example, the famous photo of US soldiers raising the flag over Iwo Jima is about as iconic as a piece of photojournalism is ever likely to be. Whether the photographer had time to think about what he was seeing or not, the image stands.

Its beauty is unimpaired by the elimination of middle tones. Alexander Pope was once asked if it was really possible to translate a great poem. He answered that only a great poem can be translated. This makes sense. Only a work of art with great depth can survive the process of translation, whether of Homer's Greek into English, or of gray tones into the language of pure black and white.

The Baroque landscape painter Claude Lorrain specialized in simple designs of strong darks and strong lights. He may or may not have actually invented the tool which bears his name, a sheet of glass painted on one side with with black paint. The so-called "Claude Glass" is a very helpful tool, found in ateliers and studios everywhere these days. An image reflected in such a glass is reduced to a simple pattern of lights and darks. (If you're leery about carrying around a piece of glass, a piece of black plexiglas will do the job just fine.)

The simplified image really displays Lorrain's poetry by omission. The delicacy of his transitional tones are completely lost here. Ironically, in the work of an artist whose procedure was closest to the sort of binary code we are examining, the simplification process does his work no favors.

Most of us would agree that Hans Holbein was among the greatest portraitists of all time; the linear accuracy of his faces has never been improved upon. How does something this tight survive the acid test of total contrast?

Quite beautifully, I'd have to say. The composition is monumental, even without the beautifully realized likeness of Sir Thomas More. The simple blobs of light and dark tell us something about the sitter's wisdom, his gravitas. The fact that virtually nothing survives of that which Holbein is most noted — his staggeringly beautiful drawing of the human face — tells us that the master was far more than simply the greatest portrait painter of all time. He was also a composer, par excellence. Give that some thought the next time you stop in at the Frick collection for another look at this portrait of The Man for All Seasons.

Well, if we're examining composition as a matter of blobs of dark and light, artfully positioned and juxtaposed, we can't ignore Rembrandt. Surely no painter, except perhaps Caravaggio, gained more notoriety in the binary code of dark and light.

This lovely self-portrait is a nice example of simple zones of black and white. The only place where its playing-card simplicity is violated is exactly where it should have been violated, at the point of focus, where the painter's face is described with a few spots of dark, and a terminator line almost lost against the blast of reflected light. Thomas Craven wrote that the language of oil paint may be incapable of greater description than this. I think maybe it can be, but don't get me wrong when i use one of my own pieces as a case in point. I am making no attempt whatever to square off with Van Rijn.

We ought to take a look at the art of the comic book. In the film Chasing Amy, a comic book artist referred to inkers as "tracers". However, comic book inking distinguishes itself, more than in any other respect, by the inker's understanding of composition as a matter of blobs of black and of white. A professionally inked page shouts from across the room. The inker's blobs of black are descriptive, and architectural. They provide the armature upon which the movement of the story hangs. Inking is so complex a procedure that it is a wonder how many competent inkers there are. Scott Hanna, Rodney Ramos, Joe Sinnott, DIck Giordano, Wally Wood, Klaus Janson, Mike Royer, Josef Rubenstein and others come to mind. A skilled inker can bring a marvelous breadth and excitement to a well-pencilled page.

Still, a lot of comic book artists refuse to surrender their pencil sketches to someone else's interpretation. One of the best is Mike Mignola, whose compositional and storytelling style cannot be divorced from his sensitivity to the architecture of black and white spaces. This example, from his miniseries Hellboy in Hell, defies any explanation on my part. Without context, without lettering, and without color, the page tells its story with simplicity and beauty. Already drawn in black ink, with no attempt at modeling, the page needs no Photoshop manipulation.

Since we're talking about comic book art, I should mention something the great comic book artist Gil Kane told me. In the period leading up to his maturity, in the late 1960s, Gil began each workday by purchasing a copy of the New York Daily News. He brought it to his studio and spent half an hour with it, holding a fat Magic Marker. He used the News because it featured more photographs than any other New York paper. Kane went over each photograph with the blobby Magic Marker, going over the dark areas of each photo. With time, he acquired a sense for how large areas of black supplied a sense of modeling that no tricks of cross hatching could ever equal. The story, Gil learned, lay in the pattern of large blacks and large whites. It was soon after he began this exercise that he refused to allow others to ink his pencils. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he grew to provide effects of reality that would otherwise have lain way, way beyond his ability to draw.

I'm somewhat hesitant to place my own work in this august company, but i guess it would be an act of cowardice to refrain. Here is a picture from last summer, Spillway Girl, done in the open air from a posed model and a recurring background. Very little attempt on my part to manipulate anything except cropping:

How does it survive the black and white acid test? Not as well as Rembrandt or Holbein or Mignola, but not entirely badly, either:

Looking back in this stark black and white world, I wonder if my purposes might have been better served by cropping more tightly on the left, so that the dark blob of the graffiti glyph might have formed the left-hand border of the upper reaches of the picture. a big L-shaped black blob could well have been more satisfying. But the streaks of dry pavement in the lower left ring true. The girl's silhouette works nicely. The spotlight formed where the water cascades from the sluice gate, bathing the girl's foot, pleases me.

It's a good test.

It's so good a test, in fact, that I think I'd be wise to add the broadest Magic Marker one can purchase to my sketching kit. Once a composition has been worked out in pencil, why not take it one step further? Try redrawing it with a blobby Magic Marker. Draw big shapes, see if they please the world's most critical eye: one's own.

The Theory of Mosaics

We talked briefly about mosaics yesterday. They're one way of looking at painting, and how one does not paint things but rather areas of hue, value and chroma which, viewed together, form the sensation of reality.

Look again at the motif from 3/10 and 3/15:

There are dozens of small objects visible in the photograph, and one might simply choose to trace each one, transfer its outline to canvas, and fill it in with color, like a paint by numbers set. This was essentially the procedure in the Medieval period and the early Renaissance, and the PreRaphaelites used it as well. Minus, of course, the availability of photography. A lot of stuff was seen. The medium was egg tempera, a material as well suited to detail as a hard lead pencil. Come the fifteenth century, glazes of oil paint came to be laid on top of tempera underpaintings. It's a lost art, and a lost science. Jan Van Eyck's glazed paintings look as fresh today as they did centuries ago, while a lot of Maxfield Parrish's works are falling apart after seventy or eighty years.

But there's another way to take in a scene like this. Supposedly it was Velasquez who first introduced direct oil paint, without any tempera underpainting. He is sometimes credited with inventing the procedure of taking in the whole scene at once as a pattern of light and shade on the retina of the eye, rather than a series of piecemeal details. We call the practice impressionism. He and Vermeer are perhaps the greatest impressionist painters.

The above photograph can be viewed in this fashion, breaking it up into individual squares, each one containing the averaged out hue, value and chroma for that area enclosed. If there are a lot of such squares, the image will closely resemble the photograph:

Although the image is now broken up into tiny squares, the equivalent of brushstrokes, its subject matter is recognizable enough. We can view the scene even more broadly if we wish:

Given ever larger squares, the motif becomes less and less recognizable (although if you squint hard, you can still see the original subject matter). Additionally, contrast is lessened. This is because tiny areas of highlight or darkness are averaged out into their surrounding area. Some painting procedures demand one begin in this fashion, grasping the entire scene without any focus. In subsequent sessions, the broad areas of color are subdivided. This is often referred to as coming out of the fog.

A painter is not required to limit himself to equal sized areas of color, or a homogenous lack of focus. Much to the contrary, he can hit certain edges crisply and let others be lost. He can finish small areas, and let others go. Best of all, he can hit the extreme lights and darks. But the notion of mosaics as a way of seeing the whole motif, without getting strangled by its detail, is a very useful one.