Abstracted

Here's some more recent artwork, this produced with a brush rather than a mouse and pixels.  It's after one of my heroes of abstraction, Hans Hofmann, and entitled "Here Comes the Sun":

One of my students in How to Look at Art this semester protested that abstract art seemed to him to be "without intention," which I take to mean that there doesn't seem to be much thought put into it in its distance from recognizable figures.  My painting above actually took a great deal of thought and time in execution, and it is based upon landscape--the sun rising over a green hill.  There is cloud, rain, and grass.  But sometimes I've produced abstraction that isn't based on anything but its own gestural form, as in Scherzo, a piece I did a couple of years ago which I still like, a Pollockian swirl and spatter of paint:

But I've also had some time for realism lately, such as in the piece below that I did in early summer, based loosely on a photograph taken near Loveland Pass in Colorado in early June of 2011 when the snow was still deep on the higher elevations.  The guy on the horse is a long-time friend of mine who loves the mountains:

The work of painting and drawing goes on--abstract or realist--and it's always a labor of love.

Photoshop Art

Lately I've been playing around with a trial version of Photoshop Essentials 10, the pared-down version of Adobe's Photoshop.  I'm using it to create modified images for my course this semester on How to Look at Art.  Yesterday I started doing some compositions from scratch with the range of imaging tools the program has to offer, especially the different "brushes."  Here's what I came up with:

It's an abstract composition, obviously, that has the distinct feel of an impressionistic watercolor, or a "water-acrylic."  I like what I came up with and will do more of these, I'm sure (and probably post them into this blog), but for all their power and versatility, a computer mouse and Photoshop are not a brush and paint.
One of the primary reasons I love doing art is the physical, visceral connection between me and the canvas/paper/board through the brush, pencil, pastel stick, or whatever tool or medium I'm holding in my hand.  Perhaps I should try this sort of thing on an iPad--if I had one; it might be analogous to "real" drawing and painting.  I do use a sketch application on my smartphone, which is nice for capturing visual ideas where I happen to be at the time.  But it's never as good as those old-fashioned tools for creating art down in my studio.

Battle Days

These days of late August are Battle Days.  One hundred fifty years ago Union and Confederate armies were settling in for a major multi-day battle in northern Virginia.  It was the bloody culmination of a campaign that had begun with the appointment of John Pope, on June 26th, 1862, as general of the newly constituted Army of Virginia, tasked by President Lincoln with moving south to take Richmond, something his cautious commander of the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan, had been unable to accomplish over the past months from the Peninsula.  By late July McClellan had been beaten back from the gates of Richmond and Pope's army lay between Culpepper and the Rapidan River to the south.  Robert E. Lee, the relatively new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, as it came to be called, freed from the threat of McClellan, decided to move north against Pope in order to push Union troops out of northern Virginia and open a way for a campaign into Maryland.

Out of this would come the Second Battle of Manassas, or the Battle of Second Bull Run, which began late on the 28th of August, and ended on the 30th with the utter defeat of John Pope.  It was a campaign of brilliant strategy & maneuver executed by Lee's subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, before the final crushing battle on the old ground of Bull Run, the first battlefield of the Civil War.

In a previous post on this blog I mentioned poring over the panoramic battle maps in The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War back in my youth.  These days I've been reading selected battle histories and other books about the Civil War in sync with the 150th anniversary of that conflagration.  This year its the 1862 battles and I read a history of Shiloh in the spring.  These past couple of weeks I've been working through John J. Hennessy's superb account of Second Manassas, Return to Bull Run. But it's been difficult reading, especially as the campaign gave way to the actual battle.  The carnage in the fields and woods of northern Virginia on those days in late August was unbelievable, with some of most intense, close-up fighting of the war.  Soldiers wrote home describing what they had seen and experienced, such as one infantryman from the 7th Wisconsin who fought against the Confederates of the Stonewall Brigade:  "We advanced to within hailing distance of each other, then halted and laid down, and, my God, what a slaughter!  No one appeared to know the object of the fight, and there we stood one hour, the men falling all around; we got no orders to fall back, and Wisconsin men would rather die than fall back without orders."  ... Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote:  "Our one nights experience . . . . eradicated our yearning for a fight.  In our future history we will always be found ready, but never again anxious."

I have been moved to grief over these accounts of Americans killing other Americans, and the cacophony of death seems to ring deep in my soul, like brutal .  It makes me want to visit the battlefield--and mourn.  I wonder if I can complete Hennessy's book--I've only got around one hundred pages left--but I know I will.  But more death is waiting.  Longstreet's division is moving for the final devastating charge against Pope's left flank.  Soon his army will be swept from the field, leaving only the dead and dying in the thousands covering the ground.  Quiet.  A brief respite.  Then, three weeks from now, armies will clash again near a stream in western Maryland on an even bloodier day.     

Rain

We've been waiting a long time for this here in northwestern Missouri:  rain.  It started early this morning and has continued for six hours, by my reckoning:  a steady, drenching rain.  I can almost see the grass in the back yard turning from a scorched tan to green, almost hear the roots sucking up the water.  There's much ground moisture to make up, but this is a good start.  Here's the view of our back deck a few minutes ago:

Two New Drawings

In the past several days I've framed two drawings done this past summer.  The first is one in graphite based on a Rembrandt painting of St. Paul.  I did it for practice and thought it came out better than expected:

The second is a pastel of what I imagine is a Parisian woman beckoning me back to Paris.  It started out as a copy of a drawing by Monet, but things went a little sideways with the face.  Still, I still like way it finished.  The eyes are a little big, but it all seems to fit together somehow:

New Art

I recently completed an oil pastel of a flower bed in the Jarden des Tuileries, which is just west of the Louvre in Paris, very near where the old Tuileries Palace once stood.  The pastel is based on a photograph I took there in May.  I framed it this afternoon and it now hangs in our entryway.  Here it is:

Understanding Fiction

These days--the last days of summer break--are work days, as I tune up syllabi, etc.  Today I was working on the reading list for my Understanding Fiction class, which is populated with short stories and two longer works:  The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Metamorphosis by Kafka.  I use a fairly consistent list of stories for this course, which I teach every couple of years, but change out a few of them for variety.  It's a first-rate line-up, including Sandra Cisneros, Toni Bambara, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Tan, Ralph Ellison, Sherman Alexie, Flannery O'Connor, Tim O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ha Jin, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Ann Mason, William Faulkner, and Raymond Carver. I teach novels in other courses, but the short story always seems to work best in courses like this, mainly because it's a compact form that includes all of the basic elements of fiction and each story can usually be covered in one class period.  I also like the variety of voices in the stories over one semester, and I like the windows they open into the human condition.  Last time I taught this one of my students characterized the course as a kind of "psychology of literature" because we spent so much time talking about what motivated the characters, which is the central question in fiction I believe.  

The Dream of Paris

Before I went I had often imagined Paris, and read about it, of course, especially Hemingway.  I the past few years I had taken to painting it as well, always in watercolor.  I would find a photograph online and use it as the basis for art.  I was primed, then, for the reality of Paris I suppose, but nothing quite prepared me for the emergence into City of Light quite literally from underground.  My son Peter and I had taken the Metro from Gare du Nord south to Vavin, the station on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and the closest one to our hotel around the corner on the Rue Delambre.  It was a rainy evening in May--is there any better way to first experience Paris?--and I came up the stairway into Montparnasse and found that the dream had taken sensual form around me, as if I had walked into one of my own watercolors:  There before me was boulevard with the lights of cars and the windows of the cafes Le Dome and La Rotonde reflected on the mirror of the wet street. Three months later the moment is still with me and I suspect it will always will be--a moveable feast, in Hemingway's celebrated phrase.

Though it's not taken at night, this photograph of Le Dome on Montparnasse in 1925 by Eugene Atget captures a certain "look" of Paris from that time that has always captured me.

I'll probably do some more blogging about the Paris trip, but the weekend is here and I begin teaching again on Tuesday.  Just a couple of days to complete start-up chores before the semester begins and I want to write some about that.  Guess I'll have to stop thinking about Paris--for a day or so anyway.

August Turn-around

Seems like months. . .

The summer is about over.  I've been back at Conception Abbey this week cleaning my office, preparing for another year of teaching.  Today I saw some of the new students arriving on campus, cars packed with clothes and other dorm-life necessities.  Next Tuesday, the 21st, I'll be back in the classroom for the new semester.  It's the August Turn-around, when I shift out of summer mode.

I read a lot this summer, but nothing focused.  I've got no new fall courses to prepare for--only re-runs that simply need some tweaking.  I finished books on Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx), the Civil War (The Longest Night), Caravaggio (Graham-Dixon's bio), a history of the Finns in Minnesota, the physical structure of the Internet (Tubes), Bell Labs (The Idea Factory), string theory (The Elegant Universe), and the history of Paris (Seven Ages of Paris).  I also read a lot of spy novels, mostly by Daniel Silva, Alan Furst, and John Le Carre (The Karla Trilogy).  Diversity--the way I like it.

No writing, though.  I've still got that book percolating inside, but my only creative output this summer was in the form of paint, pastel, and graphite.

Oh, yes--I also went to Paris.

Speechless and Renewed

You might ask:  How is the Book coming?  The one about God as a kind of poet that I wrote about in a post late last year?  Well, the Book abides, as the Big Lebowski might put it.  It rumbles, bumbles, grows.  I've been reading books, doing research, taking notes, and thinking thoughts.  Not much writing yet, except for the notes.  I'm not ready to write because to be quite honest I'm still not sure what I want to say, or if I have anything worth saying to anyone other than myself.


I think--I think, mind you--I have a beginning:  Jesus writing in the sand.  You might remember the scene from the eighth chapter of John's gospel, the one where the woman caught in adultery is brought to Jesus as a test of his orthodoxy.  "Should we stone her, as Moses taught?"  Instead of answering immediately he stoops and begins to write on the ground.  The authenticity of the passage has been disputed, but I like the scene a lot because I like the idea of Jesus writing something--or drawing a picture:  the Greek word here is ambiguous--in a kind of delay between their challenge and his response.  Perhaps he was stalling, making random marks or even playing tic-tac-toe while he thought of how to answer the Pharisees.  Or perhaps he was writing a poem.


In his essay "The Government of the Tongue," the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney comments on this scene:  ""Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.  Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life.  In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil--no lyric has ever stopped a tank.  In another sense, it is unlimited.  It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed" (107).


Speechless and renewed.  It describes my experience at mass in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception at Conception Abbey, where I work.  Jesus' poetry is there--in the priest and the people, the Word spoken, the bread and wine.  His poetry also abides in the stone, wood, and stained glass, in the Beuronese murals of the life of Mary on the upper walls.  But he's outside the sacred walls too, sliding and slamming his poetry of everyday life.  It's all poetry, and that's what I want to write about.

Art Chronicles (1)

I'm dusting off the blog once again in this new year, this time to post some recent (and not so recent) art and write about it a bit.  Along with writing, art is my chief creative expression and I've been producing quite a lot of it over the past few months and learning a great deal in the process.  I'd like to share some of that learning here on the blog, partly as a way to re-start (again).

I used to draw and paint in high school, oh so many years ago, and only picked it up again in the last few years.  Since then I've been practicing in watercolor, acrylic, oil, graphite, charcoal, and pastel.  I've also messed around some with collage and mixed media.  To characterize my style as "eclectic" is an understatement:  I like to imitate the style of many artists, from Michelangelo to Modernism.  One of my favorite strategies is to take an artist who happens to be inspiring me at the moment from a book or a recent visit to an art museum, and imitate what he or she is doing in order to get inside of the art and learn something.

Though I have a particular fondness for gestural abstraction, such as in the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, last week I decided to take one of my long-unused square canvases (24" X 24") and "do a Mondrian."  Though the paintings of Piet Mondrian do not inspire any kind of deep pathos in me, I find his abstract works interesting from the point of view of composition--especially the balance of elements within the compositional space.  In his case, grids of black lines and geometric shapes of (mostly) primary color.

I started out with a mock-up of a possible composition of a "lozenge"--a rhombus, or diamond-shape.  Mondrian did some of these and I wanted to see if I could do one, too.  The mock-up, using construction paper, looked like this:

This gave me a point to begin, but did not dictate how the final composition would look, as you can see:

My work imitates Mondrian's style, but does not duplicate any of his lozenges that I know of.  It was a step-by-step compositional process as well.  My first line was the vertical black one on the left, next to the blue triangular area (which I painted after the line had dried).  I believe (I didn't keep track) the next one was the right-hand vertical black line at center right which runs down the right side of the yellow area.  After adding a thicker black line on the bottom half of the lozenge, I decided to paint in another vertical black line to make a double track.  I have seen this in Mondrian's compositions, but to me it simply felt right both for the sake of balance and interest.  Thereafter, the lines and blocks of color were added, one by one, and sometimes tweaked for balance, not only from right to left, but from top to bottom.  For example, the top horizontal line under the red patch was thickened near the end of the painting process because the top felt too "light" to me in terms of weight, even with the deep cadmium red there.  (It was an odd and interesting thing to consider the relative "weight" of colors in this kind of painting)  The final patch I added was the small triangle of black at the bottom of the blue triangle where the two lines intersect.  Then it was done.

I'm not sure I'll do another one of these, but I do like how it came out, and my respect for Mondrian's skill as an artist was confirmed.  Doing one of these pieces is not easy and it took me a full week to complete it, even though I was using fast-drying acrylics.  Mostly, I needed time to just look and let the painting tell me what to do next.

There's a purity of form in Mondrian's geometric compositions that is satisfying to undertake, at least to me as an artist, though not in the same way as hurling paint at a canvas, which I also like to do.

I'd appreciate any comments you'd like to make about this post.