"So rumble, young musicians, rumble. Open your ears and open your
hearts. Don't take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as
death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have unclad confidence, but
doubt. It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town —
and you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely
contradictory ideals alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times.
If it doesn't drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And stay hard, stay
hungry and stay alive. And when you walk on stage tonight to bring the noise,
treat it like it's all we have — and then remember it's only rock 'n' roll."
Like the Tom Seaver quote I mentioned on March 25 of last year, this says something to me about what it is to be a painter, and thoughts like these have kicked around in my head for years.
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
On Jack Kirby
I recently came across Kirb Your Enthusiasm in my roamings on the internets, where a bunch of different writers are looking hard at single panels of artwork from the great Jack Kirby. He was my favorite comic artist growing up, and I remember consciously imitating his style for lengths of time (the weird, longish muscles; the metallic squiggles, the thick fingers, the complex machines, the crackles of cosmic energy); at least I imitated it as best as I could understand it. I remember instantly recognizing his work whenever I saw it, whether it was current work like Kamandi or Captain America, or reprinted work like the Fantastic Four, Thor, or old fantasy/horror pieces.
Kirby’s work was wild and big and really exciting to me. And although I was also nuts about the work of my favorite Spider-Man artist, John Romita, whose work was tighter and cleaner and more conventional and realistic in a lot of ways, Kirby was always King to me. And I had healthy respect, but not love for Steve Ditko, mostly born out of the fact that he created Spider-Man. I have more respect for his rubber-limbed figure work and monstrously grinning faces now than I did as a kid. Those are my Big Three, then and now, and when I see comics today, I unconsciously fit the style I’m looking at as closely as I can to one of them.
But Kirby, he’s someone I need to go back to, and look at some more. I need to admit that he’s as big an influence on my own work as my biggest painting heroes, Matisse and deKooning (to name the first two painters who always come to mind).
A few years ago, when I was looking at and drawing old comic book ads, I also had an uncontrollable urge to draw a couple images from Kirby – a striking little panel from a fantasy mag with two figures in the distance and the Italianate scroll of an old fashioned streetlight in the foreground, and a curvaceous figure from a Thor comic, the Enchantress. I did them for myself, the first because I loved the composition, the second because I loved the lines.
As a kid, I didn’t really fully understand the work he was doing in Kamandi or Captain America, but the pictures were enough. I know I bought my first Kamandi just because of the cover, and not because of the post-apocalyptic, Planet of the Apes-like story. And maybe because I liked the subtitle of “Last Boy on Earth.”
So I’m going to spend some time looking at Kirby’s stuff again. I have a few stacks of old comics in my studio, and the next time I’m in Toledo, I’m going to see if I can find some old issues of Kamandi in the crate of my old comics in the hall closet. And we’ll see what I bring back from all those crackling old universes.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Museum Guard Influences, Part 2 – Three OBPs, 1993, 1995
During the time I was a guard at the Met my regular department was 20th Century Art and Design, and while I was there, that department seemed to have a love affair with Old British Painters, giving retrospective exhibitions to Lucian Freud, R.B. Kitaj, and Howard Hodgkin.
Of the three, I had the least use for Kitaj, whose exhibition was held in 1995. There were some beautiful drawings in charcoal or pastel in the show, but his paintings seem to me to be self-indulgent and unresolved and illustrative [some other time I’ll talk about the word ‘illustration,’ which was a bugaboo to me in art school and which can cause some folks to get their hackles up]. So-called ‘intellectual’ or ‘literary’ painting, Kitaj simply skimps on the painting, hoping the ‘meaning’ will carry the burden of the aesthetic weight. And painting doesn’t work that way. Too bad, because he had a beautiful hand at drawing, and I wanted to like his painting more, both because of his considerable ambitions and because he was born an Ohio boy, but the work just seems to me to be a weak pastiche of Degas and Chagall.
Lucian Freud’s exhibition in 1993 was a problem for me. At the time, I was committed to working from direct observation, and so I was very excited to spend some time with Freud’s exacting and tireless vision, because I had not seen much of his work in person before. My favorite piece by far was a small self-portrait, cropped to include not much more than the artist’s face and neck. And I remember changing my overall opinion of his work daily. His insistence on framing the works behind glass did not help. But I think what pulled me back and forth about his work was the meticulousness of the observation and commitment to a very specific and structured way of working on the one hand, and sheer ugliness of paint and surface on the other. They posted the famous de Kooning quote prominently in the exhibition: “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” But Freud does not use oil paint in a way that benefits from the properties de Kooning was talking about: oil paint’s fluid transparencies, translucencies, and creaminess. Instead, Freud, with his insistence on using so much Kremnitz white, a lead white that easily turns scabby and coagulated, and his insistent re-painting of surfaces without first scraping down the surface, uses oil paint in a way that takes no advantage of the inherent ‘fleshiness’ of the medium. My final verdict on Freud still holds for me today: a good, not great, painter with severe technical limitations and not great sense of light and color. Overrated, I have to say. I guess it helps to have Grandpa Siggy in your tree.
Which brings us to Sir Howard Hodgkin, whose work I admire most of the three, and probably admire more than any other 20th century British painter [not a distinguished list], probably because in their exuberance of marks and color his paintings are the least British of them all. Like Kitaj, his paintings were also exhibited at the Met in 1995. I remember working one of the first days of the show, on a Saturday morning before the galleries could fill with visitors, and there was one man looking at the art, a kind of short, late middle-aged, decidedly dumpy looking guy. Bilbo Bagginsish. Anyway, while this quiet and nondescript little old guy was carefully examining Hodgkin’s work, the guard on the next post up from me, also a painter, and I started to talk about the work. He asked me what I thought, and being a young painter who was trying to learn and form opinions and talk about painting, I told him what I thought. The first few rooms, the earlier work, I thought was loose and disjointed, didn’t hold together, was tentative in color, etc. But after those first few rooms, I thought they get more confident and the color gets richer and the marks grow in scale and it felt like to me that it really picks up steam and roars all the way to the end of the show. The other guard goes hmm, yeah, I see what you mean, and adds his own two cents.
When I move up a post an hour later I see that the museum has posted a blown-up black and white photo of Hodgkin on a ferry in Venice, and lo and behold [you, dear reader, probably saw this coming], that frumpy little dude who had the galleries all to himself that morning was Sir Howard himself. Oh my god, I thought, poor Sir Howard comes to New York for a triumphal retrospective at the Magnificent Met, and has to listen to some dumb shlub guard who isn’t impressed with his early work. “Damn colonists! Everyone’s a critic!”
Anyway, I still love Hodgkin’s work and I think he’s one of the best working today.
Of the three, I had the least use for Kitaj, whose exhibition was held in 1995. There were some beautiful drawings in charcoal or pastel in the show, but his paintings seem to me to be self-indulgent and unresolved and illustrative [some other time I’ll talk about the word ‘illustration,’ which was a bugaboo to me in art school and which can cause some folks to get their hackles up]. So-called ‘intellectual’ or ‘literary’ painting, Kitaj simply skimps on the painting, hoping the ‘meaning’ will carry the burden of the aesthetic weight. And painting doesn’t work that way. Too bad, because he had a beautiful hand at drawing, and I wanted to like his painting more, both because of his considerable ambitions and because he was born an Ohio boy, but the work just seems to me to be a weak pastiche of Degas and Chagall.
Lucian Freud’s exhibition in 1993 was a problem for me. At the time, I was committed to working from direct observation, and so I was very excited to spend some time with Freud’s exacting and tireless vision, because I had not seen much of his work in person before. My favorite piece by far was a small self-portrait, cropped to include not much more than the artist’s face and neck. And I remember changing my overall opinion of his work daily. His insistence on framing the works behind glass did not help. But I think what pulled me back and forth about his work was the meticulousness of the observation and commitment to a very specific and structured way of working on the one hand, and sheer ugliness of paint and surface on the other. They posted the famous de Kooning quote prominently in the exhibition: “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” But Freud does not use oil paint in a way that benefits from the properties de Kooning was talking about: oil paint’s fluid transparencies, translucencies, and creaminess. Instead, Freud, with his insistence on using so much Kremnitz white, a lead white that easily turns scabby and coagulated, and his insistent re-painting of surfaces without first scraping down the surface, uses oil paint in a way that takes no advantage of the inherent ‘fleshiness’ of the medium. My final verdict on Freud still holds for me today: a good, not great, painter with severe technical limitations and not great sense of light and color. Overrated, I have to say. I guess it helps to have Grandpa Siggy in your tree.
Which brings us to Sir Howard Hodgkin, whose work I admire most of the three, and probably admire more than any other 20th century British painter [not a distinguished list], probably because in their exuberance of marks and color his paintings are the least British of them all. Like Kitaj, his paintings were also exhibited at the Met in 1995. I remember working one of the first days of the show, on a Saturday morning before the galleries could fill with visitors, and there was one man looking at the art, a kind of short, late middle-aged, decidedly dumpy looking guy. Bilbo Bagginsish. Anyway, while this quiet and nondescript little old guy was carefully examining Hodgkin’s work, the guard on the next post up from me, also a painter, and I started to talk about the work. He asked me what I thought, and being a young painter who was trying to learn and form opinions and talk about painting, I told him what I thought. The first few rooms, the earlier work, I thought was loose and disjointed, didn’t hold together, was tentative in color, etc. But after those first few rooms, I thought they get more confident and the color gets richer and the marks grow in scale and it felt like to me that it really picks up steam and roars all the way to the end of the show. The other guard goes hmm, yeah, I see what you mean, and adds his own two cents.
When I move up a post an hour later I see that the museum has posted a blown-up black and white photo of Hodgkin on a ferry in Venice, and lo and behold [you, dear reader, probably saw this coming], that frumpy little dude who had the galleries all to himself that morning was Sir Howard himself. Oh my god, I thought, poor Sir Howard comes to New York for a triumphal retrospective at the Magnificent Met, and has to listen to some dumb shlub guard who isn’t impressed with his early work. “Damn colonists! Everyone’s a critic!”
Anyway, I still love Hodgkin’s work and I think he’s one of the best working today.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Museum Guard Influences – de Kooning, 1994
I was a guard at the Met for two and a half years after graduate school. It was a good gig for a young artist: four day work week, health insurance, decent enough pay that I could afford a studio, and, of course, the chance to look at great stuff all day. The chance to live, forty hours a week, with some of the most beautiful things in the world. It was an education in itself.
I have my favorites in the permanent collection – favorite rooms, favorite pieces, favorite elevators and floors, even – culled from standing for hours at a time in the same rooms, looking at the same paintings, or sculpture, or chairs, or jewelry or whatever. And I’m pretty sure that from fall of ’93 to February of ’96, I spent shifts in every gallery in the place. I’ll probably write about some of those favorites in the permanent collection some time, but lately I’ve been thinking about some of the special exhibtions that happened while I was there and how they have affected me as an artist.
The first show that comes to mind is the retrospective of Willem de Kooning paintings that originated at the National Gallery and came to New York in the fall of 1994. It was a knockout show, full of the best examples of each period from his career, beginning with the early biomorphic abstractions, to the classicist, obsessively worked paintings of men, moving on through the brilliant black and whites, to the women and the gritty urban abstractions, to the highway paintings, to the strange and gooey reprise of women after his move to Long Island, to the yellowy pastorals, to the explosive and generous landscapy abstractions of the ‘70’s, and culminating, of course, in the slowly emptying areas and ribbonlike arcings of the very last paintings, when he was succumbing to Alzheimer’s.
De Kooning is a hero of mine, and I think one of the greatest painters ever to work in this country. He is a hero because of his commitment and working methods, as well as because of his straightforward, if often malapropped, unpretentious, and richly insightful statements about painting. Sometimes I think of him as the Yogi Berra of modern art. Yes, I’ve read the Stevens and Swan biography and I know he was a selfish bastard, too, with a monstrously mucked up personal life, but I prefer to admire the art, if not the artist. I’ve been thinking a lot about the black and whites lately, in relation to my own monochrome paintings. Their melting cubist structures, their marvelously slippery and speedy passages of paint.
Many other paintings stand out in my head of course – Pirate, Attic, Doorway to the River, Easter Monday, Whose Name Was Writ in Water, Woman with Bicycle, to name a few. I remember watching Allen Ginsburg losing himself in that last one, which for some reason struck me as pretty funny.
But I also came away with respect for that much maligned period in his career in the 60’s just after he left Manhattan and started working out in his self-designed studio in the Springs, the period of strange oblong paintings of women and highly keyed colors of close-toned yellows and pinks and cadmium light reds. The ‘mayonnaise’ paintings. They are difficult paintings to like, but by show’s end, I liked them. I had looked long and hard enough to see that they did indeed work, gaudily and brazenly and with a healthy dollop of frothy bad taste, really. I learned that some things reveal themselves slowly, but once they begin, they can be as exhaustive and fulsome as some of the richest work of his careeer. And I began to see how they had led the way into the great, orchestral work of the 1970’s, in which the color took on such rich and hearty life.
It was one of the best lessons learned while working at the Met – that sometimes the art that seems weird and ugly and formless beyond help, does actually have something to it that works, and it will reveal itself with a little work from you. The trick is developing the instinct to discover what will reward that kind of patience. Another thing I learned from working at the Met is the importance of good, comfortable shoes.
I have my favorites in the permanent collection – favorite rooms, favorite pieces, favorite elevators and floors, even – culled from standing for hours at a time in the same rooms, looking at the same paintings, or sculpture, or chairs, or jewelry or whatever. And I’m pretty sure that from fall of ’93 to February of ’96, I spent shifts in every gallery in the place. I’ll probably write about some of those favorites in the permanent collection some time, but lately I’ve been thinking about some of the special exhibtions that happened while I was there and how they have affected me as an artist.
The first show that comes to mind is the retrospective of Willem de Kooning paintings that originated at the National Gallery and came to New York in the fall of 1994. It was a knockout show, full of the best examples of each period from his career, beginning with the early biomorphic abstractions, to the classicist, obsessively worked paintings of men, moving on through the brilliant black and whites, to the women and the gritty urban abstractions, to the highway paintings, to the strange and gooey reprise of women after his move to Long Island, to the yellowy pastorals, to the explosive and generous landscapy abstractions of the ‘70’s, and culminating, of course, in the slowly emptying areas and ribbonlike arcings of the very last paintings, when he was succumbing to Alzheimer’s.
De Kooning is a hero of mine, and I think one of the greatest painters ever to work in this country. He is a hero because of his commitment and working methods, as well as because of his straightforward, if often malapropped, unpretentious, and richly insightful statements about painting. Sometimes I think of him as the Yogi Berra of modern art. Yes, I’ve read the Stevens and Swan biography and I know he was a selfish bastard, too, with a monstrously mucked up personal life, but I prefer to admire the art, if not the artist. I’ve been thinking a lot about the black and whites lately, in relation to my own monochrome paintings. Their melting cubist structures, their marvelously slippery and speedy passages of paint.
Many other paintings stand out in my head of course – Pirate, Attic, Doorway to the River, Easter Monday, Whose Name Was Writ in Water, Woman with Bicycle, to name a few. I remember watching Allen Ginsburg losing himself in that last one, which for some reason struck me as pretty funny.
But I also came away with respect for that much maligned period in his career in the 60’s just after he left Manhattan and started working out in his self-designed studio in the Springs, the period of strange oblong paintings of women and highly keyed colors of close-toned yellows and pinks and cadmium light reds. The ‘mayonnaise’ paintings. They are difficult paintings to like, but by show’s end, I liked them. I had looked long and hard enough to see that they did indeed work, gaudily and brazenly and with a healthy dollop of frothy bad taste, really. I learned that some things reveal themselves slowly, but once they begin, they can be as exhaustive and fulsome as some of the richest work of his careeer. And I began to see how they had led the way into the great, orchestral work of the 1970’s, in which the color took on such rich and hearty life.
It was one of the best lessons learned while working at the Met – that sometimes the art that seems weird and ugly and formless beyond help, does actually have something to it that works, and it will reveal itself with a little work from you. The trick is developing the instinct to discover what will reward that kind of patience. Another thing I learned from working at the Met is the importance of good, comfortable shoes.
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