tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30068642072720782972024-03-08T15:59:54.635-08:00Found in translationElena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.comBlogger138125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-35375814540231982512014-05-15T15:12:00.003-07:002014-05-15T15:12:47.920-07:00On being Epicurean<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.” <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/07/annie-dillard-the-writing-life-1/" target="_blank">Annie Dillard </a></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do enjoy a good schedule, a well-designed routine; it really does free one’s hands (and one’s mind); and I do firmly believe in the power of showing up every day (rather than “waiting for the Muse”). But for a couple of weeks now, I have been trying something opposite: I have completely and utterly freed my life from all time-catching nets, destroyed all scaffoldings (there are things I absolutely must do -- but this domain is strictly limited to the bare minimum).</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> An exercise in free fall, if you will -- or in free flight: what I do with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this hour</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, with this particular </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here and now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is exactly what I want to do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here and now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-2fd26c54-01e8-b26c-0465-dbc196cc5abb" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here is why: my schedule, which had been pretty effective and comfortable for a while, failed to pass a “stress test”, a relatively mild one, as a matter of fact. The rapid deterioration of political situation in Ukraine and in Russia exerted a strangely powerful pull on my mind, drawing me into its life-threatening flame further and further by the day, by the hour even, and almost completely destroying the fragile harmony of my existence. It seemed like almost any step through my daily schedule led me, inevitably, into the quicksand of “checking the news”. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I saw huge chunks of my life falling into bottomless time gaps, which kept appearing somewhere between the scaffolding and the building itself; days disappearing away as easily and pointlessly as though there were no “day-catching net” in place.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wasn’t, I came to understand, replacing my scheduled activities with anything enjoyable, quite the contrary: my usual daily routine consisted of things way more pleasurable than reading the news. I kept doing something both completely anti-Epicurean and completely counterproductive: decreasing my pleasure and increasing my pain and frustration, and losing time and productivity by the same token. The question was, then: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">if I was not doing what I had planned to do anyway, why wouldn’t I rather switch to what I really </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wanted</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to do, something that would give me pleasure rather than pain?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The answer, when it came, was unexpected and, to tell you the truth, rather frightening: in those crucial moments, </span><b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">don’t know</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> what it is that I want to do</span></b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, plain and simple; there must be some desires within me, surely, but no awareness of them whatsoever. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don’t get me wrong: there are many things I know I love to do; </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>and yet it seems like “love to do” (in principle) and “want to do” here and now are not the same thing:</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> it turns out that, even if your schedule is constructed from your love-to-dos exclusively, it can still be misaligned with the inner rhythms of your desires. It can still work while there is an inertia of daily routine; but if something breaks it (like, in my case, the events in Ukraine), this misalignment leaves you helpless and clueless. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At least if you have lost touch with your desires, like I have. </span></span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-2fd26c54-01eb-5da2-df75-46759363a3ff" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And it’s rather easy to lose touch with them, for the sheer lack of practice: if one’s life is controlled and constrained by a tight schedule (be it self-imposed or determined by the circumstances), held together by the inertia of daily routine, </span><b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what’s the point of ever knowing what it is that you want to do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">?</span></b><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> You aren’t going to do it anyway -- you’ve got a plan and a schedule -- so this knowledge would just add more frustration. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have heard that the same “loss of touch” can happen even with such a basic thing as food. If one eats what one is given, and always at predetermined “meal times”, and the portion size is also fixed by someone else -- then the inborn skills of recognizing hunger, appetites, satiation are often lost for the lack of practice; one doesn’t hear these natural body clues any longer, and this can lead to all kinds of eating disorders. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a similar way, my live-long love of good schedules seems to have lead me into some kind of “living disorder”. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So this is the why and wherefore of my little experiment in redesigning my life: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wanted to reawaken myself to the inner current of my desires, and to do that, I reckoned, I had to promise myself to follow them.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Originally, I thought I’d be running this experiment for a couple of weeks (and they are nearly over), but it has been working so well so far that I think I’ll stay with it for a while more. </span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">For one thing, I’ve managed to completely wean myself from this compulsive-obsessive news checking; I do check the news, but no more than necessary (about ten minutes a day, in fact). It turned out, too, that I want to take my bike for a ride around the nearby lake quite often -- quite a healthy change, by all accounts. Or reading Pushkin: one of the most enjoyable activities on this earth, surely, and I’ve known it since forever, but it somehow slipped away from my neatly scheduled life; so much so that I was surprised (pleasantly) when I felt this desire. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then there is this very post, of course: over the last couple of months, I could scarcely bring myself to string two sentences together, and this blog had been completely abandoned. Whenever writing a blog post would show up on my schedule, I would feel reluctant to do so (and so decide to “check the news”). </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Now, though, in this particular moment of my life, I am writing because I’ve detected this desire to write within, not without, on my “to-do” list</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> -- as it has turned out, this desire does come, and quite often. Writing this has taken a much longer time than I used to spend on a blog post, but every minute of it was meaningful and filled with pleasure. And if you are reading it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, it means that, at some point, I felt the desire to publish it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do want to end it with a promise to keep you informed about how this experiment goes, but this would defy the idea, wouldn’t it? Just another to-do item for my non-existent (for now) to-do list… </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Still, I believe I will return to this theme at some point, because something tells me I am not the only one experiencing this kind of “living disorder”</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: I’ve read, for example, that some people use </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">random number generators</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to choose what to do </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> from lists of things they wanted to do (when they put them on their lists). This very need to have something outside yourself choose for you what you want to do, even if completely at random, looks to me like a symptom of the same misalignment, the same loss of touch with oneself. </span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-2fd26c54-01ef-f6d3-e16e-bf8221dd1cac"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so I want to write down, both for myself and for you, just in case you’d want to try it one day, how I am learning to reawaken myself to the inner current of my desires, to listen, to get back in touch. But I still have a long way to go in this process, so we’ll wait and see… </span></span></span></div>
Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-28668712362198753642013-12-03T19:11:00.000-08:002013-12-03T19:11:46.308-08:00All you want to know about painting: a painting language (I)<div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The next question in "All you want to know about painting" series comes from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a>: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There are two essential qualities implicit in the concept of language, which aren't immediately apparent in painting (but they <i>are</i> there nonetheless, which is why the concept of "painting language" makes sense). </span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/---x6WnyxEh4/Up0_Ezy3jPI/AAAAAAAAgWo/TAEbPV49R4s/s1600/2-Lascaux+Cave+Drawing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/---x6WnyxEh4/Up0_Ezy3jPI/AAAAAAAAgWo/TAEbPV49R4s/s1600/2-Lascaux+Cave+Drawing.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">First, a language works with <b>arbitrary signs</b>: in general, there is nothing intrinsic which would associate the form (sound) of a word with its meaning, that is, the objects it is supposed to "represent" in language; such associations are based solely on arbitrary conventions. Not so in painting: a combination of marks on a flat surface would <b>represent</b> a "real world" object only insofar as the viewer can recognize their visual similarity. This possibility depends</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> on the neural machinery (and trickery) of vision and image recognition, which is "hard-wired" in our brains (hence universal to all humans), not on variable arbitrary conventions. That's why we easily recognize bulls in cave paintings of Lascaux (dated at about 40000 years ago), but we would be at a loss if we were (by some miracle) to hear the word these painters used for "bull". </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5dluvvVSGUI/Up1IzQyw2GI/AAAAAAAAgW4/gOn6qMQ1k3A/s1600/bust-of-a-woman-and-self-portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5dluvvVSGUI/Up1IzQyw2GI/AAAAAAAAgW4/gOn6qMQ1k3A/s1600/bust-of-a-woman-and-self-portrait.jpg" height="400" width="331" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/pablo-picasso/bust-of-a-woman-and-self-portrait" target="_blank">Pablo Picasso. Bust of a woman and self-portrait.</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Although scientists began to study and understand the intricacies of our internal neural machinery only in the twentieth century, painters had intuited lots of its tricks long before that (some of them, as we see, at least 40 millennia ago), and this knowledge forms the basis for "the language of painting". But does it mean that there is no place for arbitrariness in painting? </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Certainly not: a</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">n eighteenth century art connoisseur, for example, would hardly be able <b>recognize</b> a bust of a woman in Pablo Picasso's painting (on the right), even though their brains were hard-wired (roughly) in the same way as ours. B</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">ut we are "trained" by all the developments of the last century to recognize highly abstracted objects in paintings readily: it is now a common place, a part of convention, but only because of all the twentieth (and twenty first) century paintings we have already seen. In fact, I feel fairly confident that when the first painters made their marks on cave walls, it took some time and some convincing for other members of the tribe to recognize animals in these marks: it was, for all we know, a more revolutionary shift in thinking and perception than anything Picasso could have possibly done. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This brings us to the second essential quality of language, which is necessary insofar as there is arbitrariness: a language must be </span><b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">shared</b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">; that is, the speaker and the listener must share the same set of conventions for the </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">message to get across. For painting, it means its language should be shared </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">between </span><b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">painters and viewers</b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> (including other painters, of course).</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span><b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"> </b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet,_Impression,_soleil_levant,_1872.jpg" target="_blank">Claude Monet. Impression Sunrise.</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We all know </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression,_Sunrise" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">the story of this painting by Claude Monet</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, don't we, which gave the name to the whole Impressionism movement: Impressionists were out to paint the real, immediate <b>reality</b>, but they departed from the shared conventions of the moment dramatically enough to make their language utterly incomprehensible for most viewers, including art critics (who really should have known better). <b>What has happened since then?</b> Why this way to represent reality, which was so incomprehensible, offensive even, just a little more than a century ago, now attracts blockbuster crowds to exhibitions and thousands of painters adopting the same approach? Are the modern art lovers more sophisticated and sensitive than in the nineteenth century France? No -- we just learned the (new) language; and now that the language is shared, the message is easy to get. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Reportedly, Anna Akhmatova once said that poets have a particularly hard time (among artists), since they've got to work with the very same words people use to invite one another for tea. It might seem that painting is different, since its "language" is not the one used for everyday trivial exchanges. Or maybe we have it even worse, because a painter must inevitably rely on the eye's and brain's visual machinery evolved mostly under completely unrelated pressures (at least, it seems reasonable to assume that one's ability to appreciate cave paintings played a less significant role in survival and gene propagation than the ability to detect and recognize things, distances, and motion in the "real world"). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">What's more, <b>a poet doesn't need to change the language </b>to say something novel and meaningful (although some of them have done so), but for a painter these two actions, making a painting and changing the language of painting, are almost inseparable, <i>precisely because there is less arbitrariness in painting than in language; </i>the language and the message are intrinsically linked to each other. I will return to this topic in the next post... </span></div>
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Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-77785856389831469442013-11-27T15:35:00.001-08:002013-11-27T15:35:24.630-08:00Shakespeare, happiness, and other dangerous things<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t3j67OioNlw/UpZvNBsSDtI/AAAAAAAAgI0/q6-s0xWTnhw/s1600/1766.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t3j67OioNlw/UpZvNBsSDtI/AAAAAAAAgI0/q6-s0xWTnhw/s1600/1766.jpg" height="400" width="311" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://lenalevin.com/gal/Best/12" target="_blank">Dissolution. 30"x24". Oil on canvas. 2013</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I've just read Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on happiness": based on <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/" target="_blank">Brain Pickings</a>' recommendation, I believed it might be a good gift for a friend, but (luckily) decided to check it out myself first. And I am glad I did -- because I didn't like it at all, and I am sure the friend in question wouldn't have liked it either. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I am not going into whys and wherefores of my dislike here (I am not out to write a review, after all), but there are a couple of (partly interrelated) thoughts it helped to crystallize in my mind, which I want to record for myself, and share with you. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">First, although the book is, presumably, about the newest psychological findings, each chapter is preceded by an epigraph taken from Shakespeare, which pretty much <b>sums up the most essential of these findings</b>. Did he have some sort of time machine to travel to our times and consult with modern psychologists? I don't think so. Nor would it be enough to say that he was somehow "ahead of his time" in understanding human condition. Instead, <b>he created the framework which still defines <i>our</i> understanding of it, </b>the very concepts used to pose research questions and, to a large extent, determine the answers (both for those who have read Shakespeare, and for those who have "inherited" this framework second-hand, via other linguistic channels). That is the reason his work remains relevant, and that is one of two major reasons for my own <a href="http://lenalevin.com/page/sonnets_intro" target="_blank">"Sonnets in colour"</a> project. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The other thought is more general. Have you noticed that there are lots and lots of scientific findings (and their popular interpretations) which, ultimately, suggest that <b>human beings shouldn't trust themselves</b>? One shouldn't trust their body: if it tells you what it wants to eat, you should go and find dietary recommendations about which nutrients it <i>really needs</i>; you shouldn't trust it if it tells you it's healthy: you <i>cannot know</i> you are healthy unless you undergo regular check-ups and more and more invasive "tests"; nor, as a matter of fact, should you trust it if it tells you you are ill, unless your doctor confirms that this is, indeed, the case. Otherwise, "it's all in your head". </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This leads us to "the head", of course, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-User-Illusion-Cutting-Consciousness/dp/0140230122/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385592776&sr=8-1&keywords=user+illusion" target="_blank">which you shouldn't trust either; because your brain is engaged in permanent successful attempts to deceive you</a>, to create the illusion that what you see is really there, that what you remember really happened, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera; and, last but not least, that you have a conscious control of your own actions. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Daniel Gilbert's book goes further in this direction than anything I have read so far: you cannot even trust yourself to decide what will make you happy; nor even what <b>did</b> make you happy in the past, because all your memories are inaccurate at best or downright erroneous at worst. Which means you can learn neither from practice nor from experts; your only way out is to ask someone else whether the thing you are contemplating makes <i>them</i> happy. And if you happen to think people are too different for this to work, it's just another of your innumerable mistakes: overestimating your own uniqueness.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Don't get me wrong: <b>I don't question the underlying findings</b>; at least not all of them (some of them are really controversial and often barely substantiated, so it would be strange to accept them unchallenged, especially insofar as your own life is concerned). That's not the point: the question is rather what we do once we accept that the human mind is not an ideal machine for discovering the final truth about reality, and that the brain is a very adept illusionist (which, of course, Shakespeare knew very well). The idea of relying on someone else doesn't really look promising: not only because they are also human, but also because it would be incredibly boring.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">My feelings tell me that this ever increasing alienation from oneself, the growing mistrust <i>within oneself</i>, cannot form the path to any sort of happiness; rather, it's a sure road to despair and depression. But then again, feelings cannot be trusted, can they? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-39538518392029449762013-11-26T16:31:00.004-08:002013-11-26T16:31:53.324-08:00In defense of perfectionism<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gzpNMMNOWEc/UpP6GhBQljI/AAAAAAAAgEA/f1oK9CTfZ8M/s1600/1738.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gzpNMMNOWEc/UpP6GhBQljI/AAAAAAAAgEA/f1oK9CTfZ8M/s1600/1738.jpg" height="326" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Punschlied (after Friedrich Schiller).
16"×20". Oil on linen.
January <span itemprop="copyrightYear">2013</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I've chosen this painting to illustrate today's post, because everyone knows that a glass of Punsch must be perfect, right? Why ever would one want anything less than that? What's the point?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>I've been thinking a lot about "perfectionism" lately, and why it has received so much bad publicity.</b> It seems the older I get, the more I feel that there are fewer and fewer things in life worth doing without at least an attempt for perfectionism. Simultaneously, I hear (and read) more and more about how wrong it is, how stifling it may be; even immoral, occasionally. Recently, I read that perfectionism is what distinguishes amateur artists from professionals, but not the way I expected: supposedly, only amateur artists suffer from this plague of perfectionism, whereas the professional ones always hurry to the next work, accepting the drawbacks of the current one as a necessary learning experience. I don't really want to give a link to where I read it, because it's not the point: this attitude seems to be everywhere. I've even read somewhere an absurd claim that Cezanne was somehow wrong in his relentless perfectionism: obviously, his paintings were all right, so his dissatisfaction with them must have been a mistake, mustn't it? Why would he stubbornly return to them again and again, year after year, when the reasonable approach would be just to start another one, like a serious "professional artist"?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But is this approach something you would be willing to expect (and accept) from others? Say, do you appreciate it when your dentist hurries to the next patient, blissfully accepting the errors they've made with your own unique teeth as a necessary learning experience? Or would you like to live in a house built with this sort of attitude -- as I happen to do: our builder obviously didn't suffer from perfectionism, so we are now in the midst of a legal claim against them... Or do you enjoy a sloppy job from a chef in the nearby restaurant? <b>Or a Google+ update filled with bugs to the brim?</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I suspect every single one of us has had an experience like this, and secretly (or not so secretly) wished for more perfectionism from dentists, builders, engineers, designers, chefs etcetera etcetera etcetera, however it may stifle their creativity. So <b>why is it, then, that the meme of anti-perfectionism is still happily spreading in our collective consciousness</b>, and steadily increases the overall degree of sloppiness in all human-made things around us? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">From what I see, there are three types of situations when the anti-perfectionism meme might be genuinely useful:</span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Study. </b>Within the context of learning, there are indeed many situations when it's better to begin another attempt, rather than try to correct the previous one. In fact, lots of failed attempts are to be expected while one is studying and practicing. And yet it seems that this is <b>an argument for the very necessity of studies</b> <b>(as something separate from one's professional work), rather than against perfectionism</b> per se: indeed, don't we all hope that our dentists and builders will have left years of studies (and failures) behind them, and approach our mouths and our houses with a different attitude? Shouldn't an artist require nothing less than this of themselves?<b> </b> </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Urgency. </b>My grandfather used to tell this story: that his commanding officer, during the war (WWII) kept telling them <b>"If you guys cannot do it fast and well, then do it fast and badly."</b> (It wasn't about actual military actions: my grandfather's work during the war had to do with his near-native expertise in German: translation, propaganda leaflets, that kind of thing). Presumably, it was warranted in the war time: when something isn't done fast, it's pointless do it at all. In the time of peace, too, there might be some situations of this type; one doesn't have the time to do something perfectly, but it's better to do it anyway, at least somehow (cleaning one's kitchen inevitably comes to mind here).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Fear of failure.</b> The argument goes that it's one's perfectionism that produces this fear: one has to let go of perfectionism in order to be ready for a failure. Frankly, I don't believe this -- simply because I know many hard-core perfectionists, and all of them know that failures are inevitable and are ready for them. <b>They just don't confuse failures with finished work.</b> In other words, fearlessness and perfectionism are not just compatible; I believe one cannot be a perfectionist and be afraid of failure at the same time. In the context of this argument, the word "perfectionism" works just as a thin disguise for fear. </span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The bottom line, it seems, is this: nowadays, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">there is a limited range of situations where the anti-perfectionism meme is useful, that is, when the need to do something fast, however imperfectly, is really urgent and unavoidable. But from this limited domain, the meme spreads, it would seem, everywhere, from sloppy buildings to badly edited books to faulty software; and to art, of course. Why? <b>Because this meme seems to "win" against two less fashionable ones: the need to study, and the fear of failure.</b> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And the reason it wins, I think, is simply because <b>it tends to make people feel better about themselves </b>(and so, happier). It is somehow more pleasant to admit, even to oneself, to one's perfectionism -- than to the fact that one simply hasn't studied enough; or, even more so, than to recognize the fear of failure within oneself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Arguably, making people feel happier is a useful function of a meme "in itself"; and I am all for everyone's happiness. Still, I cannot help but dream about the end of this age of sloppiness, and perfectionism's triumphant return... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-37344770904546900422013-11-19T18:10:00.001-08:002013-11-19T18:10:52.683-08:00On accomplishments vs. recognition in painting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8vGF-fpafJo/UowIayY5f9I/AAAAAAAAgCc/IJEQxWLjnCU/s1600/1781.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8vGF-fpafJo/UowIayY5f9I/AAAAAAAAgCc/IJEQxWLjnCU/s1600/1781.jpg" height="400" width="315" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Some time ago I was talking with another painter, and he mentioned a couple of juried shows as <b>"accomplishments he was proud of"</b>. Not having organized these shows, but just <b>being accepted</b> by jurors he admired. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This passing remark initiated a train of thought about the nature of <b>accomplishments vs. recognition</b> in painting (and probably art in general), which is, among other things, reflected in my most recent <a href="http://lenalevin.com/" target="_blank">website update</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Over the last several years, I've heard many an artist lament the nature of <b>value </b>in art: that it's not the merit of an artwork itself that is being valued, but rather the name behind it, the story, the resume; in short, the history of this particular artist's work being recognized as valuable by other people. This conversation is invariably renewed whenever a painting is sold for some particularly absurd price in a major auction, or in response to specifically designed stunts (like <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/14/living/banksy-street-art-sale/" target="_blank">Banksy's recent experiment with anonymous street sales</a>). Nobody seems to like the situation, yet the art world has evidently evolved to support and <b>re-create it every day</b>:</span></span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">Read any advice from <b>"art professionals"</b> to art collectors, and after a mandatory "buy what you love" remark, you will almost invariably find the injunction to check the artist's CV: education, shows, acquisitions. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">Unsurprisingly, check <b>any artist's website</b>, and you will almost invariably find this sort of CV (sometimes, it seems like a more essential part of an artist's website than a representative sample of their work). </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">And, of course, the same sort of CV is almost invariably required in <b>applications</b> for things like exhibitions, artist residencies, and other nice things like this. </span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In other words, buy what you love, <b>but don't forget to check whether others love it, too, </b>especially those who, supposedly, know better. And, of course, whether anyone else is willing to buy it for this kind of price.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Don't get me wrong: I don't blame anyone in particular for this; I rather tend to think it's a sort of "invisible hand" phenomenon, an "emergent" structure nobody has designed, but which naturally creates and re-creates itself. Its root cause, I believe, might be in the blurred distinction between <b>accomplishment vs. recognition </b>(which brings me back to the conversation I mentioned in the beginning: an instance of <b>recognition</b> -- being accepted into a group show -- obviously perceived as an <b>accomplishment</b>).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I've read, written (and edited) my fair share of CVs and resumes from various fields in my life: academia, engineering, and, more recently, arts. And here is what I've noticed: both academic CVs and engineering resumes tend to distinguish accomplishments and recognition more or less clearly (although this tendency seems more pronounced in engineering CVs), but an artist's CV blurs the distinction altogether. Or, to put it in other words, an artist's CV is all about <b>recognition construed as accomplishments</b>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">In an exhibition catalogue written by someone else, you can find a description of what the artist has actually </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">achieved</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;"> in a particular work or a body of work; but not, as a rule, in an artist's self-presentation in the form of CV. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">No wonder exhibition catalogues tend to be a much more interesting read than CVs. But it would be even more interesting to read <b>such a description from the artist themselves</b>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">We do occasionally find bits and pieces of such descriptions in published letters and, sometimes, essays and "manifestos"; but rarely as a full story constructed by the artist themselves at a particular stage of their life and work. I sometimes imagine <b>an ideal world</b> in which such stories would be found on artists' websites, along with reproductions of their work, and, ideally, <b>instead of</b> lists of recognitions. That, I feel, would give a visitor more essential information and let them explore the work in complete freedom from societal pressures of recognition in the past. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">And while I am waiting for this world to come, that's what I've tried to do on <a href="http://lenalevin.com/" target="_blank">my own website</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-28859363240072810462013-11-14T18:11:00.005-08:002013-11-14T18:42:03.674-08:00All you want to know about painting: "routine" colour choices<div>
<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">The next question in "All you want to know about painting" series comes from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a>: </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"><b>What has an artist limit their colour palette in such a way that all their work looks like it is painted on the same day at the same time of day? </b>Or with no light reference at all? This might be asked more accurately as what is the influence of artificial lighting and colour theory in painting? Or maybe it has to do with this idea of creating a solid body of work in one style? I have no idea. I am just puzzled when I notice this result in an artist's work - my own included at times. I wonder - what is really happening here? </span></blockquote>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bpUTCZVAxlU/UoWASTrbeKI/AAAAAAAAf_I/xuXlp1zq7t8/s1600/old-blind-man-with-boy-1903.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bpUTCZVAxlU/UoWASTrbeKI/AAAAAAAAf_I/xuXlp1zq7t8/s1600/old-blind-man-with-boy-1903.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" height="640" width="466" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/pablo-picasso/old-blind-man-with-boy-1903" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pablo Picasso. Old blind man with boy. 125x92 cm. Oil/canvas. 1903</span></a></td></tr>
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It seems to me that there are many questions in one here, and I would like to split the topic. First of all, I'll save the influence of <b>artificial lighting and colour theory on painting</b> for later; also (and this is a partly related issue), I will, for now, exclude the cases where a painter limits their colour palette <b>deliberately, with a conscious expressive intent</b>. In such cases, I believe, it's more or less clear what's happening (even if it's not always easy to express in words). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Here is one of the most famous examples of this, from Picasso's "blue period", as an illustration of what I mean. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It seems to me you are asking rather about situations where an artist "falls" into a limited range of colour harmonies without conscious intent, almost without noticing it. Obviously, we can never know for sure about other painters, but you mention your own work -- and more generally, I know that such things <i>do</i> often happen unintentionally, as a result of choices made unconsciously. No wonder, since, apparently, all our actions are initiated unconsciously... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I believe there is a very general reason for this kind of unintentional repetitiveness: in most general terms, the more frequently one does something, the more likely they are to do the exact same thing in the future, especially if one somehow gets a positive feedback from earlier times. That's just how the neural underpinnings of our inner lives work: the more we do something, the "stronger" the neural pathways for doing it; and the stronger the neural pathway, the more likely it is to get activated again, and again, and again. This is essentially the same mechanism one can use deliberately to develop a certain habit (and I believe it's also related to what people sometimes call "comfort zone"). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, if a painter has successfully used a certain colour harmony -- and falling in love with the resulting painting created a positive feedback for their unconscious, they are likely to take the same path again. And the more they do it, the more likely they are to repeat it. And then it just might happen that you look back at your own work and suddenly <i>see</i> the repetitiveness you haven't noticed in the process, the limitations you unconsciously imposed upon yourself, as though you've become addicted to a certain colour harmony. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It may happen with colour harmony, or it may happen with some other aspect of your work -- the mechanism is the same. As far as I know, the only way out (if you don't like it) is to make a conscious effort to "shake off" this unwanted routine. One can use some totally different subject matter to paint, or one can actually limit the palette in a novel way, to force oneself to work with other colour harmonies. I know some painters deliberately eliminate some favourite and seemingly essential pigments from their palette when they feel themselves falling into routine, automatic colour choices. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But one way or another, the most important thing is to be aware of the effect, and to make a conscious effort to counteract this tendency. And the good thing: this, too, becomes easier with repetition -- the same mechanism "wired" into our brains is now consciously exploited for another goal! </span><br />
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<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-15211098278686721122013-11-13T14:53:00.001-08:002013-11-13T14:53:53.980-08:00On painting and silence<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dRlqMV5Wp0Y/UmrFSuUlrLI/AAAAAAAAfic/89QPKZkJDF4/s1600/1999.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dRlqMV5Wp0Y/UmrFSuUlrLI/AAAAAAAAfic/89QPKZkJDF4/s1600/1999.jpg" height="640" width="616" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Life, my sister III: out and out, my reason is laughable (after Boris Pasternak). 20"x20". Oil on canvas. 2013.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I should really start on the next question in my <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/search/label/All%20you%20want%20to%20know%20about%20painting" target="_blank">"All you want to know about painting series"</a>, but I desperately want to tell you something I've just recently clearly understood about painting; or, to be more precise, about its role in the modern context. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">For a very long time, I had believed that painting is, in a sense, a thing of past, barely surviving just at the margins of today's art forms -- just a shadow</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">, or an echo, of its former glorious summits. There are, indeed, new art forms, thriving in discoveries yet to be made and more suited for the modern life. It was, actually, the "elephant in the room" I avoided mentioning in all my four posts on "Stories in painting": that the social function of <b>visualizing stories</b> had been long since passed from painting to cinema. By the way, I believe this might be the future of e-books: when in lieu of illustrations, one will be able to pull </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">a movie version of the same episode </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">to their tablet screen with a single click (and even choose their personal favorite among all the existing versions). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Anyway, this belief did not lead me to even consider a change in occupation: one has to do what one has to do, even if it's an old-fashioned dead end in the grand scheme of things. But it had been there, in the back of my mind, before I started a major overhaul of my website -- which, old-fashioned as I am, involved mainly thinking and writing; among other things, thinking about the role of painting in modern life. And it crossed my mind that, far from being outdated and marginally relevant, <b>it might be one of the most essential, fundamentally important art forms today</b> -- not less (maybe even more) than ever. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">You know there is this idea floating around -- that we live in an <b>"attention economy"</b>, where people's attention (actually, <b>your</b> attention) is the major resource for which everyone is competing? Well, I think that, looked from the opposite point of view, what is really in shortage today isn't attention; it's <b>silence</b>. Meaningful, mindful silence; lack of noise; genuine freedom of mind. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">You may say that one doesn't need <b>any</b> art forms for silence; one can just go for a long walk, or close their eyes in meditation. And I agree, of course -- painting isn't a replacement for this utmost solitude. But it has something else to offer: a <b>combination</b> of solitary silence with meaningful communication; interaction without obtrusion; conversation without noise. And it <b>is</b> an interaction, because the true magic of painting only happens through a <b>connection</b> with its viewer. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It is, doubtlessly, true of any art form: a book cannot live without the reader, and music needs a listener; every work of art is re-created, and co-created, by its <i>thou</i>, the one who perceives and responds. And yet a painting is most silent and least obtrusive of them all -- it doesn't initiate a contact with you, it doesn't guide you through a story, it just sits there, waiting to be seen and come alive. You can pass it by on a wall, or browse away on the internet -- but if you stop, and the connection happens, your response is entirely your own.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-24038731750758208932013-11-07T15:12:00.001-08:002013-11-07T15:12:47.850-08:00Stories in painting IV: a path to synthesis<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wOppZ8cmvQU/UnwNu0otrDI/AAAAAAAAf8U/M3OI3rZecTY/s1600/2005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wOppZ8cmvQU/UnwNu0otrDI/AAAAAAAAf8U/M3OI3rZecTY/s1600/2005.jpg" height="640" width="415" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still life with Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. 30"x20". Oil on linen. In-progress.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This post completes my little story of <b>stories in painting</b>, begun as my answer to <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/111462209637206932844" target="_blank">+Alexander M Zoltai</a>'s question (here are the previous posts of this small series: <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/stories-in-painting-i.html" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/stories-in-painting-ii-of-gods-and.html" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/paul-cezanne.html" target="_blank">3</a>). But it's really not a completion, but rather a new beginning. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In my previous posts, I've tried to pinpoint (what I feel as) two major underlying forces behind painting's divorce from stories: <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/stories-in-painting-ii-of-gods-and.html" target="_blank">the overwhelming angst brought about by human-made catastrophes of the last century</a>, and <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/paul-cezanne.html" target="_blank">the increasing (and, arguably, misleading) role endless stories play in our inner lives</a>. My intuition is that, at some level, this split is but another manifestation of other, probably more generally conspicuous, splits in the life of humankind: between <i>rationality and intuition</i>, <i>conscious and unconscious</i>, <i>science and religion</i>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I feel that the time is ripe for synthesis, and that's my dream and my credo: I am in search for a painter's path to this synthesis, and my beacon on this quest is <b>poetry</b>. Not quite "stories", since a poet engages language at another level; and yet, not quite <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/paul-cezanne.html" target="_blank">the dog-like absence of stories</a> either. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I am not at all sure where this path will lead me, so there will be no final answer to your question. Just this preliminary illustration (above) of the step I am currently on, a work-in-progress called "Still life with Letters of Vincent Van Gogh". Apart from reference to Van Gogh, it also has <a href="http://web.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/thundering_valor.html" target="_blank">a poem linked to it, by Osip Mandelstam</a>, or rather one quatrain of it:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>For the thundering valour of ages to come,<br />
For humanity's noble tribe,<br />
I have lost my cup at ancestors' table,<br />
And my honor, and all my joy.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Can I tell you how this painting embodies this poem? Not really, as it is a fundamentally non-linguistic link: the words and rhythms are in the poem, the colors and lines are in the painting; and the more universal counterparts (which are neither) defy linguistic expression. And still: there is this gesture of relinquishing color (lost in black and white on the right and in the lower part of the painting), a painter's ultimate sacrifice; and this struggle between downward and upward movements (yet to be strengthened in further work); and, of course, a nearly "lost" black cup. </span><br />
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<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-29322584617747482632013-10-23T17:35:00.000-07:002013-10-23T17:35:03.880-07:00Life returned without any reason<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--qWWHJmBOC0/UmhWBkv0-XI/AAAAAAAAffE/WWYYY76IKO8/s1600/1969.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--qWWHJmBOC0/UmhWBkv0-XI/AAAAAAAAffE/WWYYY76IKO8/s1600/1969.jpg" height="640" width="488" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Life returned, without any reason (after Boris Pasternak). 14"x11". Oil on linen. 2013.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The concept of being fully present in </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">here and now -- </i><b style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">aware, mindful, fully alive in the present moment</b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, undistracted by stories of past and future playing themselves out in your mind; this idea seems to be one of the major themes of our age. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And all too often, it seems to imply that every one of us ought to find this ability deep within oneself, in one's heart of hearts, independently of the environment, far away from any external influences. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There is a lot of truth in this, but don't you feel there is also a contradiction here? A contradiction which might be resolved at some level of zen mastery (I wouldn't really know), yet quite acute for most of us: looking for ability to be <i>fully present in the universe</i> by <i>fully withdrawing into one's inner self</i>? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The thing is, this state of mind, this experience of being fully alive in the present -- it does come (unforced, untrained, childlike) to all of us in <i>some</i> moments; emotionally charged moments when everything seems to align to heighten the experience of life. I don't know about you, but I have a special reservoir for such moments in my memory, many of them from the far-away depths of my childhood; memories I used to call upon to save me in my darkest nights. I say "used to", because I have now (kind of) learned to re-create this inner state without anchoring it in any specific moment of my past. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I have learned it (to some extent; I have way to go still), and I try and share it through paintings -- like this one above, "Life returned without any reason", painted after Boris Pasternak, who was a real, unsurpassed master of living and <i>sharing</i> these moments -- probably my single most important teacher in the art of living them. And this brings me to three things I really want to say here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The first is, I believe one <i>needs</i> these naturally occurring, unforced moments of joyful heightened awareness (rather created by the world for you than found within yourself) in order to learn it as an inner state; and it's probably <b>as necessary to "feed" your inner self with such genuine moments as it is to feed your body with real food.</b> After all, that's the whole point of <i>here and now</i>, isn't it: that you are not alone, isolated within yourself; there is this whole universe ready to create such moments for you, if you just let it. But you can certainly help it by going somewhere new, and beautiful, and interesting, at least if the environment you live in doesn't give you enough of them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Secondly, these moments, and this inner state, can be <i>shared</i>; which is to say, one can live such a moment and experience this inner state of awareness through someone else. And art -- music, poetry, painting -- is the major, if not the only, means of communicating them. Or, if you will, of creating <b>the humankind's shared reservoir of these brightly alive memories</b>. This, I think, was one of the impulses behind <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/paul-cezanne.html" target="_blank">the impressionists' movement away from stories and towards "here and now"</a>. The bottom line is, this infinite shared reservoir is there for every one of us; and neither of us has to be alone within oneself while it is there. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Last (but by no means least), nowadays (thanks to the Impressionists' achievements), the skill of impressionist painting can be <i>learned</i> by anyone (before you ask: no, it's not a matter of talent). It's not even that hard (much easier than photography as far as I am concerned). It won't get you to the high shores of today's art world, but <b>it is one of the most straightforward and enjoyable paths towards these <i>here and now</i> moments</b>, since the very process teaches you to be highly aware of your constantly changing environment: the movement of light, the swish of leaves, the smell of air. And as a bonus, you have a memento of this moment right there on your canvas, to return to whenever you feel like it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The bottom line is, I guess, one doesn't really have to rely on oneself alone, to go deep within oneself, to find this inner "here and now" state of being fully alive. Both miracles of nature and sublime creations of human spirit are there to help you along. </span>Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-7911174472357516862013-10-22T15:40:00.001-07:002013-10-22T16:22:58.857-07:00Stories in painting III: like a dog<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pliI0UMP-DE/Umb7QBNVVLI/AAAAAAAAfb8/8HTqVLogba8/s1600/compotier-glass-and-apples-1880.jpg!HD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pliI0UMP-DE/Umb7QBNVVLI/AAAAAAAAfb8/8HTqVLogba8/s1600/compotier-glass-and-apples-1880.jpg!HD.jpg" height="537" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/paul-cezanne/compotier-glass-and-apples-1880" target="_blank">Paul Cezanne. Compotier, Glass and Apples. 46 x 55 cm. Oil on canvas. 1880. </a></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This still life by Paul Cezanne returns us to the tale of disappearances of stories from paintings (here are two first posts from this little series: <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/stories-in-painting-i.html" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/stories-in-painting-ii-of-gods-and.html" target="_blank">2</a>). Another episode of this particular plot in the history of painting: its conscious divorce from "literature" in the age of impressionism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Rainer Maria Rilke recounts an interesting dialogue in his "Letters on Cezanne" (letter of October 12, 1907). He asked a painter friend of his, Mathilde Vollmoeller, to go with him to Cezanne's exhibition; and at one point, she told him: "<b>He sat there in front of it like a dog</b>, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A remarkable turn of phrase, <b>"like a dog"</b>, isn't it? I believe it means, first and foremost, <b>"story-less": </b>a quieted mind, without endless "stream of consciousness" which tends to keep talking in our heads, weaving endless stories about itself and the world, and creating nervousness and ulterior motives in the process. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As far as I recall, Noam Chomsky estimates that this ceaseless silent talking constitutes 95% of our linguistic activity; in other words, 95% of talking goes on in our heads without ever being "externalized". Which means, for him, that <i>that</i> is the function of language: <i>thinking</i>, not communication. Yet there is also a theory (or rather, a cluster of theories from different fields) that real thinking happens non-verbally; that this eternal internal story-telling, while not without some usefulness, takes over too much of our inner life and distracts us from awareness of <i>here and now</i>; from being fully alive and present in the moment: <i>like a dog</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is also this hypothesis (present in somewhat different forms in different theories) that this inner storyteller's role </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(however one calls it)</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">in our lives has been increasing throughout history and is actually getting out of hand, occasionally becoming more harmful than it is useful. Insofar as this is true (as I believe it might be), this evolution could just be what the age of Impressionism was responding to -- in moving painting away from stories and towards <i>here and now</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It might also be the reason why impressionism remains relevant, and meaningful, and so alluring for painters and viewers. I will return to this theme tomorrow, please stay tuned... </span><br />
<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-54634228310398143562013-10-14T16:05:00.000-07:002013-10-14T16:05:01.462-07:00Stories in painting -- II: of gods and humans<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This post continues my story of stories in painting, my answer to <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/111462209637206932844" target="_blank">+Alexander M Zoltai</a>'s question in my <b><a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/search/label/All%20you%20want%20to%20know%20about%20painting" target="_blank">"All you want to know about painting"</a></b> series. Here is <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/10/stories-in-painting-i.html" target="_blank">the first part of this answer</a>, in case you have missed it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have approached <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/111462209637206932844" target="_blank">+Alexander M Zoltai</a>'s question (<i>"how do you incorporate a story into one painting"</i>) indirectly, by addressing another one: why have stories disappeared from paintings? I <i>will</i> return to the original question, I promise (insofar as it applies to me, at least), but for now, I want to take yet another huge step back in the history of painting (or even, more generally, image-making), and see how stories <b>first appeared</b> there. </span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7FOWSIw5ghI/Ulxm5m5QsEI/AAAAAAAAfPs/JSXt3qkptLA/s1600/theoriginofconsciousness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7FOWSIw5ghI/Ulxm5m5QsEI/AAAAAAAAfPs/JSXt3qkptLA/s1600/theoriginofconsciousness.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The original question makes an implicit assumption (quite natural at this particular juncture in time and space) that <i>one painting represents but one moment in time</i>; one stage in a story: a momentary scene you could conceivably see as a whole (or take a photo of) had you eye-witnessed the story unfolding. This had been, indeed, the general convention of historical paintings, "genre" paintings, illustrations, for a long, long time. Yet not always. Paintings, after all, aren't photos: apart from conventions, there is <b>nothing</b> to prevent a painter from composing a <i>single</i> painting which would combine <i>many</i> different moments from the same story, thus incorporating multiple points of its plot. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The photo above is from a carving on the front of Tukulti altar (made around 1230 B.C. in Assyria). It shows Tukulti-Ninurta I, tyrant of Assyria, <i>twice</i>: he first <i>approaches</i> an empty throne of his god, and then <i>kneels</i> before it: two stages in his (apparently futile) attempt to call his god back to his throne, but the throne is the same, so it's essentially one image, not a sequence of two. My attention was recently drawn to this image by <a href="http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php" target="_blank">Julian Jaynes' book, "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind"</a>. According to Jaynes, this carving illustrates the event of gods disappearing from the world of humans (don't mistake this formulation: for him, gods are, essentially, neural -- or psychological -- phenomena, which didn't make them any less real for people who communicated with them and received instructions from them; nor any less tragic when they gradually disappeared). It is, of course, by no means the only image of this ("multiple-moments") type in the history of art, but I chose it for this post, because I feel the disappearance of stories from painting might be, in some sense, related to the disappearance of gods (hence, to the origin and evolution of consciousness). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In any event, this type of story telling <i>within a single image </i>had gradually disappeared from the art of painting, just as the single-moment representation of stories did, later on. In the second part of this post, I want to invite you to contemplate the difference between two much more recent paintings, separated by about a century from one another. Here is the first one, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Day_of_Pompeii" target="_blank">"The last day of Pompeii", by Karl Briullov (1830-1833, 465.5 cm × 651 cm)</a></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">: </span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mHuT9XBziQo/UlxwdQuRxOI/AAAAAAAAfP8/3A6fAQD97ng/s1600/Karl_Brullov_-_The_Last_Day_of_Pompeii_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mHuT9XBziQo/UlxwdQuRxOI/AAAAAAAAfP8/3A6fAQD97ng/s1600/Karl_Brullov_-_The_Last_Day_of_Pompeii_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" height="448" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A classical example from the tradition of historical painting: the painter imagines a single crucial moment in a story known (more or less) to his viewers, and composes a multifigure scene around it. You can stand in front of this painting forever examining different little sub-scenes, emotions, expressions, movements; or you can let the overall composition impress you with the horror experienced by these people in this last day. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And here is the second one, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_%28painting%29" target="_blank">"Guernica" by Pablo Picasso (1937, 349 cm × 776 cm):</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Just a bit more than a hundred years separates these paintings, and they both react to terrible stories of human sufferings, pain, and death, but they come as though from different worlds. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Could Picasso do something akin to a traditional historical painting on this occasion? Technically, he could: there is no doubt in my mind that he had all the requisite skills, both in drawing and in composition. Conceptually? I don't believe so. I don't believe that the horror of Guernica (as well as other horrors of the last century) could be conceivably conveyed within the conventional academic-historical genre to the contemporary viewers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is, you see, one most fundamental difference between the horror of Pompeii and the horror of Guernica: one is about what nature (or gods) can do to humans, the other is about the seemingly inconceivable things humans can do to each other. Humans are no longer just victims, they now stand accused.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span>Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-86180703421835956302013-10-03T13:02:00.000-07:002013-10-03T13:02:33.134-07:00Stories in painting (I)<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FA1l0ZiEIEo/Ukt6ZYwfaGI/AAAAAAAAfMg/TYXNDG2XqNI/s1600/Hands_of_God_and_Adam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FA1l0ZiEIEo/Ukt6ZYwfaGI/AAAAAAAAfMg/TYXNDG2XqNI/s1600/Hands_of_God_and_Adam.jpg" height="210" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 12px;">The next question in our <b>"All you want to know about painting"</b> series comes from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/111462209637206932844" target="_blank">+Alexander M Zoltai</a></span>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 12px;"><b>"How do you incorporate a "story" (meaning some sort of "plot") into one painting?" </b></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A short answer would be "I don't", but it would be a bit like playing Shakespeare's gravedigger </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(</span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.bartleby.com/70/4251.html" target="_blank">"Upon what grounds? Why, here in Denmark"</a></i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">)</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">: as straightforward and honest as it is meaningless</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The thing is, when I say "I don't", I am referring to a certain tradition of <b>visualizing stories in paintings</b>, the tradition hinted at by the universally recognizable detail above, from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Creaci%C3%B3n_de_Ad%C3%A1n_%28Miguel_%C3%81ngel%29.jpg" target="_blank">Michelangelo's <i>Creation of Adam</i></a>, the tradition that used to be the highest expression of this art form and which still constitutes, arguably, the unsurpassed pinnacle of painting within the history of Western civilization. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here is another famous instance of this tradition, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_%28Leonardo_da_Vinci%29" target="_blank">Leonardo's "The Last Supper"</a>:</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YVK33ox7j5U/Uk2oPbtdm6I/AAAAAAAAfNc/aWVLMaf3LNE/s1600/U%CC%81ltima_Cena_-_Da_Vinci_5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YVK33ox7j5U/Uk2oPbtdm6I/AAAAAAAAfNc/aWVLMaf3LNE/s1600/U%CC%81ltima_Cena_-_Da_Vinci_5.jpg" height="348" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have chosen this painting for this post because it highlights two key aspects, two opposing sides of this tradition:
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<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First, the viewer is supposed </span><b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to know the story</b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (at least to some extent) -- it's not the painter's job to </span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">tell</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> it, it's already told. The painter choses a single moment in the story and composes the painting around it. There was a lot of variation over time in how the moment is chosen, and how the painting is composed (and, in particular, in how much freedom an individual painter has in these choices), but </span><b style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">it's always a single moment</b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, a climax of the narrative. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The compositions are usually complex, multi-figure ones, with <b>some less obvious sub-stories going on all over the picture plane</b>. These, however, aren't known stories: they invite the viewer to figure out these subplots for themselves -- and sometimes, like in this case, the controversies about them go on for centuries, including the question of whether the painter had indeed wanted to make these surrounding events clear and straightforward, or the message, possibly subversive, was intentionally "hidden". </span></li>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The source of this tradition is, I believe, the quest to make archetypal, culture-defining stories more "public", external, accessible, to endow the culture with shared ways to visualize, imagine these stories. Risking some oversimplification, here is also the fundamental split between two branches of Western Christianity and between their associated national cultures: Reformation choses to make the stories more accessible with language (translating them into vernaculars), Catholicism invests into their public, shared visualizations. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vVZszsbBXI0/Ukt_onGhX8I/AAAAAAAAfM0/-XxLRSQsX2Y/s1600/no-1-royal-red-and-blue-1954.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vVZszsbBXI0/Ukt_onGhX8I/AAAAAAAAfM0/-XxLRSQsX2Y/s1600/no-1-royal-red-and-blue-1954.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" height="320" width="186" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark Rothko. No. 1 Royal read</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and blue. 1954.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This tradition, with all its glory, had been, in effect, abandoned by the art of painting some time ago (even though its remnants still survive at its periphery). </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The change is painfully palpable if you visit museums featuring different periods of art history; just recently, during our trip to London, I had the chance to feel this contrast again, between the National Gallery and Tate Modern collections. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the former, your eyesight is overwhelmed with stories, movements, fights, battles, passions, gods and goddesses, bodies, faces, gestures, interactions, complexities, fascinating minute details of human condition. The latter, by contrast, feels empty (even if often quite colourful), devoid of any narratives, almost as though not only gods, but humans, too, have already forsaken this planet. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am illustrating this here </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">with </span><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/mark-rothko/no-1-royal-red-and-blue-1954" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">one of Mark Rothko's paintings on the left</a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, but it's obviously not only about abstraction: stories, narratives have disappeared from representational paintings, too (just recall Cezanne's "apples and mountains"). In a sense, the fate of Michelangelo's unsurpassed feat in visualizing the Book of Genesis on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel shows the same phenomenon: although the Chapel is still crowded by tourists (their arms outstretched to the ceiling with smartphones in their hands), the modern culture has reduced its complexities to the single climatic "two-hands" detail, effectively making a minimalistic modern painting out of the enormous whole. W</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e (kind of) don't need or want more nowadays... </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What happened, then? Why did stories disappear from painting? Or are they still there, just in a different form? These questions feel personally urgent to me, and I don't really know the answers (to be more precise, I know too many different answers, but neither of them rings true enough to be convincing). So, I will continue to explore this topic in a couple of more posts of this series (so stay tuned if you are interested). </span><br />
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The second question comes from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/101131201901730432126" target="_blank">+Tarja Ollas</a>: <b>How do you choose your canvases?</b><br />
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Actually, the question was, originally, about how I stretch canvases -- it was modified because I don't stretch canvases at all (and I had tried to exclude such "technical" questions in my original announcement). The reason why I wanted to exclude them is two-fold: there is a lot of this kind of information around, mostly coming from people who care more about this side of the craft, and know more about it, than I do; and I often feel its importance is overestimated, especially from the point of view of a beginning painter (maybe because it's much easier to teach stretching than to teach painting).<br />
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Let me tell you a story to illustrate what I mean. I once met a man who admired other peoples' perceived talents in painting and was convinced that he had no such talent himself, even though he had always wanted to paint. Because at some point, he decided to try -- so he built himself an easel, stretched himself a canvas, and then <i>found a random photo in a magazine and tried to paint the same scene </i>(on his carefully hand-stretched canvas). The result was so disastrous that he concluded he had no talent, threw away his easel and his canvas, and never tried it again. <br />
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I sometimes get a vague feeling that information about painting that floats around the world in general and World Wide Web in particular suggests and encourages this disastrous approach: to oversimplify just a bit, to become a painter, one needs an easel, a hand-stretched canvas, and a talent. Moreover, a "real painter" just <b>must</b> stretch and prime their canvases themselves; otherwise, they are naive beginners at best or eternal amateurs at worst.<br />
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On the other hand, if I were to rank things that go into the making of a painting (and a painter), the list would rather look like this:<br />
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<li>Studies, studies, studies and practice, practice, practice.</li>
<li>Brushes.</li>
<li>Paints (pigments).</li>
<li>Talent (abilities).</li>
<li>Support (canvas, canvas board, paper, whatever). </li>
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And only the first one has to be hand-made... Making brushes, paints, mediums, supports -- there are very few things in the life and work of a painter that can easily be delegated, and that's them. That's why I don't stretch my canvases, don't mix my paints, and don't make my brushes, but buy all those things ready to use. <br />
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To return to the original question: I prefer oil-primed linen, but it doesn't really matter much. The only thing essential for me in painting support is a certain degree of "catchiness" (that is, it should catch paint, not let it flow and glide) -- so for example, I do not use masonite boards. It can be a stretched canvas, or a canvas mounted on board -- the feeling is slightly different, and I know it's a crucial difference for some painters, but not for me (except boards are usually more convenient for plein air). I also prefer "gallery-wrapped" canvases, because they can be hung without framing, and I dislike frames most of the time -- but most, if not all, pre-stretched canvases are gallery-wrapped anyway. They are also all "archival" enough as far as I am concerned; but the truth is, I am not really concerned about "archival" qualities either.Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-28503814284523453652013-09-20T12:07:00.001-07:002013-10-03T13:00:34.106-07:00All you want to know about painting: are black and white colours?This post begins my new "All you want to know about painting" series, where you can ask any question related to the art, and craft, and history of painting, and I promise to answer to the best of my knowledge.<br />
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The first question comes from <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a>: <br />
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<b>When and how did it get decided that black and white were not colours? (This comes from Rilke's observation that Cezanne used white and black as colours and that this seemed to be something new.) -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a> </b>
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Black and white in language (and in our mind's eye) </h3>
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I believe this is the still life <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Letters-C%C3%A9zanne-Rainer-Maria-Rilke/dp/086547639X" target="_blank">Rilke is talking about in this letter</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_052.jpg" target="_blank">"Black Marble Clock", 1869-1871</a>, dominated and structured by a black thing (the clock) and a white thing (the cloth). The essential quality of the painting for Rilke is that <i>"black and white /.../ behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized"</i> (it's the letter dated October 14, 1907 -- if you want to read the whole passage yourself).<br />
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And this is, in a sense, exactly as we see black and white "in real life", just as any other colour. In other words, <b>black and white are definitely colours</b>
from the
point of view of (what is sometimes referred to as) the naive worldview
encoded in <i>human languages</i>. This deeply embedded worldview doesn't
change as easily and quickly as scientific theories of light and colour (more about it below), and defies any
"decisions" and discoveries. Roses can still be <i>white or red</i>; jeans can be<i> blue
or black</i>; soot is <i>black</i>, snow is<i> white</i>, grass is <i>green</i>, whatever we might have learned about optics or about human vision. In these
contexts, we speak of (and think of) white and black as colours, just
like red, blue or green. Not only do we speak of them, we actually <i>see</i>
them. But it's only because our brains are so good at correcting for "white
balance" and identifying constant, "local" colour of things. In other
words, <b>we see them, but not so much with our eyes as with our minds</b>,
fitting the world our eyes perceive into the conceptual system(s) built into our
languages.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3006864207272078297#note">*</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3006864207272078297#note"></a> <br />
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<h3>
Black and white in optics: light, darkness, wavelengths </h3>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kBYTRIqlfZw/UjozURUIUMI/AAAAAAAAfEY/yoDsIvCxB-k/s1600/two-old-men-disputing.jpg!Large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kBYTRIqlfZw/UjozURUIUMI/AAAAAAAAfEY/yoDsIvCxB-k/s1600/two-old-men-disputing.jpg!Large.jpg" height="320" width="253" /></a></div>
And yet, strictly speaking, <b>white and black aren't colours</b>, are they? White is the absolute light, and so the whole spectrum of "colour" wavelengths, and black is the absolute darkness (so the absence of any reflected light). "Colour" proper emerges when light contains only a certain <b>part</b> of the whole visible spectrum (in the usual terms of colour theory, white and black have no <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue" target="_blank">hue</a>, while "normal" colours do). <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/bh.html" target="_blank">Isaac Newton was instrumental in understanding this phenomenon, when he discovered how a beam of white light splits into seven colours of the rainbow and then merges back into white again</a>. This must have happened somewhere in the late sixties of the seventeenth century (the results of Newton's experiments were published in 1672). As illustrated by <a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/rembrandt/two-old-men-disputing" target="_blank">Rembrandt's painting above ("Two old men disputing")</a> though, painters seem to have known all this intuitively much earlier (the painting is dated c. 1628). His dark backgrounds are
created by layers of thin glazes of complementary colours, designed to
reflect as little as physically possible, i.e. to absorb all light. His whites are thick and often strikingly pure,
designed to reflect back whatever light they get.<br />
<br />
It seems to me that if Rilke were to compare these paintings, he would have said that Rembrandt doesn't use black as colour: black is but a background, a nearly absolute <b>darkness</b>, a painterly version of "black
hole" as it were, not a black "thing": a device to construct the painting, not to depict the colour of a thing. It's a bit more complicated with white, I think: it can be said that Rembrandt uses white "as a colour" (we "see" the old man's clothes and
beard as "white" (just as we would have seen them as "white" in real
life), and yet Rembrandt's whites look whiter and brighter than real "white things" (except maybe a carpet of fresh snow on a sunny day, but certainly not a man's clothes in a barely lit room). They are, in a sense, <b>"absolute", ideal whites</b>, the lightest lights, which seem almost to emit light in the painting (rather than merely reflect it). Not so in Cezanne's still life, where the white cloth is (more realistically) not really <i>white</i> (<i>pun intended</i>). <br />
<br />
<h3>
Black and white in the eye (photoreceptor cells) </h3>
Interestingly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell" target="_blank">the eye has different "subsystems" for processing "light" and "hue" (rods and cons)</a>: it
switches to the B & W (or rather: dark vs. light) vision when there isn't enough light (that's
why we are taught to squint to get more accurate value judgements when
we paint, artificially reducing the amount of light that reaches our
retina and activating our B & W vision). Which means that, even from
the biological point of view, there is a clear distinction between black and white vs. colours "proper".<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M2iUD1Ye2I0/Ujt1pcNRxvI/AAAAAAAAfEo/t6eim5gzwk8/s1600/the-magpie-1869.jpg!Large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M2iUD1Ye2I0/Ujt1pcNRxvI/AAAAAAAAfEo/t6eim5gzwk8/s1600/the-magpie-1869.jpg!Large.jpg" height="286" width="400" /></a></div>
When there is enough light, though, the eye "sees" much, much more than the brain (usually) reports to its owner and more than the language can possibly encode; our cons certainly register all the subtle variations in hues of snow that Claude Monet has "shown" us (as in <a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/claude-monet/the-magpie-1869" target="_blank">this painting on the left, "The magpie", 1869</a>), but this information is normally discarded by the brain as non-essential. The snow isn't really "white" for the eye itself, even if it is for the mind.<br />
<br />
There are, presumably, good evolutionary reasons for our brains' behaviour: it is essential to identify local colour to recognize an object quickly, and the subtleties of light and hues fall victim to this need. Indeed, it won't do to be unable to recognize a hungry tiger quickly enough just
because the colour of its fur is changed by the sunset; and it's also
useful to recognize snow as snow, rather than as a variety of
differently coloured substances depending on the time of the day and the
weather. But insofar as it is not a matter of survival, <b>this strategy robs us from perceiving all the beauty, the rich variety of the surrounding world</b>.<br />
<br />
This, I believe, is the core of Claude Monet's quest (and to a lesser extent, of the Impressionist movement in general). An impressionists painter's job is to "suspend" the mind's tendency
towards simplification and idealization of visual input, to "catch" more
of the colour information the eye registers and "show" this richness to
others. So, for Monet, there are no such colours as "white" and
"black"; indeed, there are
actually no "black" and "white" in nature at all. He is interested in the non-whiteness of the white, the real
colour variety of what we usually call "whites". That's why Cezanne
(reportedly) said: <b>"Monet is just an eye, but what an eye"</b>.<br />
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<h3>
Black and white: real vs. ideal, material vs. spiritual, form vs. substance</h3>
To sum up, not only black and white aren't colours in the material, real world our eyes perceive, but there are no black and white in nature at all: a light source is
never an ideal mixture of all wavelengths (that is, it's always shifted
towards some colour) and any surface we see absorbs some light (hence,
it's never absolutely white) and reflects some light (hence, never
absolutely black); and our eyes diligently register variations of hues everywhere, most of which are never perceived by our minds: they "see" things as white or black just as easily as they see them as red or green.<br />
<br />
Earlier, I described this distance between the eye and the mind as an evolutionary strategy of simplification, but there is an alternative school of thought, which runs, in various forms, through the whole history of our civilization: our minds can grasp <b>spiritual (even divine) idea(l)s</b>, even if they are represented in nature only imperfectly. The whiteness of snow is, then, not just a simplification necessary for material survival, but a sign of our ability to live in the world of ideas, our connection with the Divine, our ability to see the real, non-material beauty, the Platonic ideas, the spiritual substance of things (of which we see only superficial forms "in real life"). An artist's job, then, is not to suspend idealization, but to strengthen the mind's connection to the ideal (this, by the way, is the essence of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Concerning-Spiritual-Art-Wassily-Kandinsky/dp/0486234118" target="_blank">Wassily Kandinsky's critique of Impressionism</a>). <b><br /></b><br />
<br />
Cezanne's quest in painting was, I believe, to find a path to synthesis between the eye and the mind, between the richness of visual reality and the mind's quest for ideals, between (as it were) Rembrandt's absolute, whitest whites and Monet non-white, colourful whites. And this, I believe, is what Rilke responded to so strongly and eloquently. <br />
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* <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="note">As an aside, there are languages where the basic colour vocabulary splits the whole range into just two words: </a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution" target="_blank">one stands for black and everything dark & cool; the other, for white and everything warm & light</a>. This doesn't mean that the speakers don't distinguish more colours, but other terms are "secondary", non-essential (like, say, "mauve" or "olive" in English). <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3006864207272078297#note_loc">Go back to text</a> <br />
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<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-62916500960742143232013-08-21T13:35:00.000-07:002013-10-03T13:00:16.130-07:00All you want to know about painting: questionsHere is a list of questions for my "All you want to know about painting" series (experimental fall run from mid-September till mid-December, approximately one answer a week; some of these questions might need more than one blog post, though...). There are still a couple of spots left for the fall run, so if you have questions for me, don't hesitate to ask!) And if you asked a question and I've missed it here, please tell me -- it could only have happened by accident.<br />
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<ol>
<li>When and how did it get decided that black and white were not colours? (This comes from Rilke's observation that Cezanne used white and black as colours and that this seemed to be something new.) -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a> </li>
<li>How do you choose your canvases? <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/101131201901730432126" target="_blank">+Tarja Ollas</a> </li>
<li>How do you incorporate a "story" (meaning some sort of "plot") into one painting? -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/111462209637206932844" target="_blank">+Alexander M Zoltai</a> </li>
<li>How has compositional design changed through time? What is the use of triangles, picture planes, colour fields and such in compositional design? -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a> </li>
<li>When is the best time to paint? -- +Rita OceanBlue</li>
<li>What is the visual continuum between what we see with our eyes, what we expect to see in a photograph and in a painting? Also, how do these various aspects influence one another? -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a></li>
<li>Show your process, from start to finish for one painting (in the form of photo album) -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/101131201901730432126" target="_blank">+Tarja Ollas</a></li>
<li>What has an artist limit their colour palette in such a way that all their work looks like it is painted on the same day at the same time of day? Or with no light reference at all? This might be asked more accurately as what is the influence of artificial lighting and colour theory in painting? Or maybe it has to do with this idea of creating a solid body of work in one style? I have no idea. I am just puzzled when I notice this result in an artist's work - my own included at times. I wonder - what is really happening here? -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a> </li>
<li>How do we develop a painting language and what is it? -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114820480752300993890" target="_blank">+Terrill Welch</a> </li>
<li>How do you know when your painting is finished? -- <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/101131201901730432126" target="_blank">+Tarja Ollas</a> </li>
</ol>
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Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-61932458914835732422013-08-14T16:56:00.001-07:002013-10-03T12:59:52.262-07:00All you ever wanted to know about painting<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s4t-Dfb7JbM/UgwP0B50KkI/AAAAAAAAe8g/euHnGOyaPQc/s1600/1807.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s4t-Dfb7JbM/UgwP0B50KkI/AAAAAAAAe8g/euHnGOyaPQc/s1600/1807.jpg" height="400" width="387" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still life with the Divine Comedy. 12"x12". Oil on panel. 2013.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">I am interrupting the silence of this blog to announce a new idea, for which I need your input. In fact, it will never come to fruition without your input.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Here is the thing. For some time already, I've been entertaining the idea of some sort of <b>teaching</b> in the domain of painting -- partly because I feel the need to share what I know, partly because I've been asked to on several occasions. Quite a few ideas for possible courses have been playing themselves in my mind, but I cannot really decide between them. So I've come to a slightly different decision: during this coming fall (<i>starting mid-September and up to the turn of the year</i>), I will be running an experimental series here. The working title is <b>"All <i>you</i> want to know about painting"</b>, which means you can ask me anything you want about painting, and I promise to answer to the best of my understanding. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">There are a couple of caveats, though:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<ol>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">The question can be <b>anonymous</b> if you don't want publicity, but the answer will be <b>public</b>: I'll be running this series both on Blogger and on Google+, for the sake of everyone's convenience. The assumption here is that if one person wanted to know something, there are good chances there are other people out there who want to know the same thing (but were afraid to ask... :). Moreover, it will give us a chance to engage other painters (and lovers of painting), who might give different answers to the same question (which you might like better). The more the merrier, I believe. <i>You can ask your question by a direct message on Google+, or <a href="http://lenalevin.com/page/contact" target="_blank">by e-mail</a>, and please specify whether you want to remain anonymous or not.</i> </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Although I've just said "anything about painting", I would like to specifically <b>exclude</b> two topics. One is the purely technical side (how to stretch a canvas, which brand of paints to buy, what equipment to use); the other is "business" (marketing, looking for representation, making a living, etc.). There are lots of resources on the internet that deal with these topics, and I want to focus on (what I perceive as) the <b>core</b> of painting.</span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-size: large;">By the way "technical" above should be read as purely technical as it were; questions about painting effects, color mixing and interactions, painting process(es) etc. are very welcome (if you aren't sure, go ahead and ask -- I'll tell you if the question is too technical, no problem there). And "business" is meant is purely "business": questions about <b>life as a painter</b>, time management, organization, etc. are welcome as well. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">On another note, I intend this series as something potentially useful both for <b>painters</b> (there is always something one would want to ask a peer, I think), for <b>beginning and aspiring painters</b>, and, last but not least, just for <b>lovers of painting </b>(who may or may not entertain the idea of painting themselves). This means that questions about how to look at a painting as a painter, whether there is anything "objective" about the art of painting, what to learn from a painting, how to understand why the painting works, how to make the most of a museum visit, etc. etc. etc. are also welcome, along with any questions on painting techniques, learning to paint, individual style, self-expression, colour theory, brushwork, etc. etc. In other words, my goal is not only to just answer your questions, but to understand what you are really interested in. If you question concerns your own paintings, some issues of the process, some problems you feel stuck with -- please send me some photos to look at. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">If you have followed me for a while, you might have noticed that, as far as painters go, I am rather on the "intellectual", scholarly side of the spectrum. I am interested in the interaction of painting and mind, painting and the intellectual issues of the day, painting and science (linguistics, neuroscience, theory of information, etc.), painting and history, etc. So if you have in mind a question from this (general) field, I would be most interested to hear it! </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">I will be starting this series (hopefully) mid-September, but I would really like to collect some questions in advance, to have some time to think about them. So please, don't hesitate to ask, I am looking forward to your questions.</span><br />
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<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-4091474204951547022013-07-18T16:03:00.001-07:002013-07-18T16:03:41.134-07:00Pocket of silence (II)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CiFYHhurEFs/UehttW5OPFI/AAAAAAAAei4/cIRHMJ9xBow/s1600/1224.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CiFYHhurEFs/UehttW5OPFI/AAAAAAAAei4/cIRHMJ9xBow/s1600/1224.jpg" height="400" width="387" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shakespeare sonnet 8: Music to hear. 20"x20". Oil on canvas</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When my computer crashed a week ago, and it became clear that the problem is serious, I suddenly experienced something I expected least: <b>a distinct feeling of relief</b>.<br />
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Of course, it wasn't a catastrophe by any stretch of imagination: I have a reliable and convenient back-up, and the Mac is still under three-year warranty; it even didn't really "disconnect" me (because of all those other little gadgets, and Eugene's desktop). So there were really no reasons to panic or worry, but that still doesn't explain wherefore the relief... After all, nobody forces me to use the laptop even when it is functional, right?<br />
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In fact, between the iPad and the desktop, I could still do almost all the things I was doing and planning to do on the Mac; it's just that the overall workflow would be just somewhat more cumbersome. But since it was clear that the return of the Mac is a matter of several days, I felt its temporary absence as a good excuse to allow myself a vacation from all those things, from minor household chores (like online banking) to adding new work to my catalog and updating online galleries and G+ albums, to writing all the posts I'd planned for this blog. In other words, I took the crash as an excuse to <b>slow down and shut up</b>: my days were now filled with painting, and reading, and thinking, and listening. In short, really good days.<br />
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Which apparently means that the need for a "pocket of silence" I mentioned a couple of weeks ago on this blog is more urgent that I had realized before. It took a computer crash and this unexpected feeling of relief to show me the depth of this need. So, even though the computer is back, alive and kicking, I'll take a couple more days (at least till the end of this week) of silence.<br />
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<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-78101262793570910102013-07-10T12:52:00.001-07:002013-07-10T12:54:43.129-07:00Cezanne and Rilke: towards the inner core of art<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xblY3iWXICE/Udyc3zAgPBI/AAAAAAAAecw/Pk0mhRWvXb8/s1600/mont-sainte-victoire-3.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xblY3iWXICE/Udyc3zAgPBI/AAAAAAAAecw/Pk0mhRWvXb8/s1600/mont-sainte-victoire-3.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" height="505" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/paul-cezanne/mont-sainte-victoire-3" target="_blank">Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1895. 73x92 cm. Oil on canvas. </a></td></tr>
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<h4>
How to see a mountain like Moses</h4>
<div>
In his introduction to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Letters-C%C3%A9zanne-Rainer-Maria-Rilke/dp/086547639X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373414679&sr=1-1&keywords=rilke+cezanne" target="_blank"><b>Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters on Cezanne"</b></a>, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet quotes this remark made by Rilke to Count Harry Kesler in front of a picture of Montagne Sainte-Victoire: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><i>"Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly"</i></b></blockquote>
I cannot know which of the multitude of versions of "Mont Sainte-Victoire" they were looking at, but that doesn't really matter: the remark evidently applies to either of them, or rather, to all of them. Just pause and have a long look at this painting above, letting Rilke's sentence play in your mind, and you will feel it.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br /><br />
I wanted to introduce this remark, and Rilke's book -- as non-technical as they are <i>precise</i> in the deepest sense -- <b>before</b> I return to <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/07/cezannes-composition-first-look-at-how.html" target="_blank">the technical discussion based on Erle Loran's book</a> I began in the first post of this series. As a painter, I am of course very much interested in the technical, constructive aspects of Cezanne's composition (they can teach you more about painting than any teacher); and yet, it's a bit too easy to lose sight of what it is, ultimately, all about if one focuses on techniques and compositional strategies alone. There is too much of this sight-losing in the contemporary world and painting-related discourse, I believe.<br />
<br />
That's why I've decided to anchor this series in two books, one by an analytically minded painter, another, by a poet, extraordinarily perceptive to painting and dedicated to uttermost exactitude in words.<br />
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<h4>
A poet and a painter</h4>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1NNbif2luLA/Ud2bN0i_aBI/AAAAAAAAedY/X7mQ2PEOXxE/s1600/rue-des-saules-montmartre-1867.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1NNbif2luLA/Ud2bN0i_aBI/AAAAAAAAedY/X7mQ2PEOXxE/s1600/rue-des-saules-montmartre-1867.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" height="312" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/paul-cezanne/rue-des-saules-montmartre-1867" target="_blank">Paul Cezanne. Rue des Saules. Montmartre. 1867</a></td></tr>
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If you've been following this blog for a while, you might have guessed that my own ultimate source of natural high lies somewhere on <b>the intersection between painting and poetry</b>. It's no surprise, then, that I would be drawn to letters on painting by a poet who is so deeply influenced by, and attracted to, visual arts. If ever this intersection (which I keep seeking, finding and losing again) has been expressed in words, it's right there in Rilke's letters to his wife. (One disadvantage is that reading Rilke's prose makes one think twice before even attempting to string two words together, because everything feels like loose wool in comparison to his clarity and precision. But if you are reading this, it means I have successfully overcome this version of writer's block for the time being). <br />
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Even if you aren't really into poetry, these letters are, I believe, a must read for anyone remotely interested in painting. On the one hand, they document how the highest success of a painter in reaching another person's soul, and mind, and the very sense of vision, looks like. <i>This</i> is the highest, and also deepest, level of human communication; <b>compassion, co-thinking, co-vision</b>. On the other hand, Rilke reaches deep into the very essence of painting; his insights are likely to teach you a lot even if you are a painter yourself. And if you are not, this is even more likely (by the way, Rilke himself said that it's only with the help of his artists' friends that he had learned <b>how to see a painting</b>).<br />
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These letters to his wife were written in 1907, when Rilke was living in Paris and visiting the Autumn Salon, with two rooms worth of Cezanne's retrospective, every day (Cezanne died in 1906). Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, but mainly he went to Cezanne rooms, because he felt there was something essential to be understood there, to learn, and described his experiences, <b>this process of understanding</b>, in the letters. He would never write a book about Cezanne, but this collection of letters, with their immediacy and utmost openness, is probably even better. <br />
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<h4>
Life vs. work</h4>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tKDb7uuT15k/Ud2yMvDvvtI/AAAAAAAAeec/7jKZt0p4pTw/s1600/self-portrait-with-palette.jpg!HD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tKDb7uuT15k/Ud2yMvDvvtI/AAAAAAAAeec/7jKZt0p4pTw/s1600/self-portrait-with-palette.jpg!HD.jpg" height="400" width="310" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/paul-cezanne/self-portrait-with-palette" target="_blank">Paul Cezanne. Self-portrait with palette. c. 1890.</a></td></tr>
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Rilke grasped the innermost core of Cezanne's achievement: the extraordinary <b>tension between the depiction and what is being depicted</b>, between what is being seen and how it is seen, between painting and motive; the tension that creates both a spark of communicative energy and a sense of ultimate harmony. Loran focuses on the workings of how this tension is achieved: how exactly does Cezanne modify the scene he sees? How does he create the tension between the deep space of illusion and the reality of the picture plane? There will be a lot about this in the future posts, but for now, I want to mention another, larger aspect of essentially the same tension, one that was urgently and personally relevant for Rilke (and is for me). The tension between <b>life and work; life and art</b>. </div>
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<b>Cezanne's life</b>, his withdrawal to Aix-de-Provence, his unwavering focus on his work -- so strong that nothing else really matters (he even missed his mother's funeral because he couldn't lose even a day of work) -- fascinates Rilke no less than his paintings. He understands that such an achievement is only possible if <b>the artist is constantly at the centre of his art, </b>not going in and out to attend to life an its daily trappings, only brushing the art's periphery. This uncompromising solitude, this withdrawal from "life" into the centre of art, tempts Rilke, pulls him into itself as though into an abyss: he feels that he should change his life as a result of this encounter with Cezanne. And I feel his temptation as my own, as though it's the only way to being truly alive. <br />
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If nothing else, it is an invigorating change of perspective and tune from the extraordinary noisiness and scurry that surrounds us now and very much defines the contemporary art world; from the pervasive, deafening pretense that things changed so much that now one has got to engage into a flurry of shows, contests, career-building activities, preferably under the wise guidance of an "art world professional", to be a <i>real artist</i>. Reading Rilke's letters, like looking at Cezanne's paintings, gives you pause, silences this noise, draws you, powerfully and irresistibly, into the utmost centre of art. <br />
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Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-54586480800733236652013-07-05T16:43:00.001-07:002013-07-05T16:43:48.996-07:00A pocket of silence<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tzE7IbVnskE/UddXOgU-_WI/AAAAAAAAeWU/1wJdzayDuLU/s1600/1906.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tzE7IbVnskE/UddXOgU-_WI/AAAAAAAAeWU/1wJdzayDuLU/s1600/1906.jpg" height="400" width="307" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Phoenix song
14"×11" (35.6×27.9cm)
<br />Oil on canvas panel
May <span itemprop="copyrightYear">2013</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">Although some sort of "Studio News" blog post about my own work has been scheduled for today, this is rather an announcement that I'll skip it, as well as, probably a few next "studio news" issues. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">After all, it's not like I really have any hot, pressing news to share; that, in a sense, is the whole point of this blog. But now, what with studying Cezanne, and going even deeper into Shakespeare, and reading Rilke about Cezanne -- I am faced so directly with, using Rilke's term, <i>the utmost</i>, so overwhelmingly genuine, real, and great that my own little bits and pieces of news seem like noise even to myself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I obviously need a <i>pocket of silence</i> to come to terms to all that, inasmuch as I possibly can; so I will be writing here for the next few weeks about Cezanne, and Rilke, and Shakespeare's sonnets, and the rhythms of English verse. This, come to think about it, is the closest I really have to "Studio News". </span>Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-39658654000383163532013-07-04T10:10:00.001-07:002013-07-04T13:01:20.778-07:00Cezanne's composition: the first look at how it works<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bp432iFJkm4/UdONVutp8eI/AAAAAAAAeMk/HL9EhG3caJk/s996/mont-sainte-victoire-1.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bp432iFJkm4/UdONVutp8eI/AAAAAAAAeMk/HL9EhG3caJk/s996/mont-sainte-victoire-1.jpg!HalfHD.jpg" height="516" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/paul-cezanne/mont-sainte-victoire-1" target="_blank">Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 65 x 81 cm. c. 1890.</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Paul Cezanne is often called "the father of modern painting"</b>, and that's true in so many senses that it almost becomes false: it's a father who would probably never acknowledge most of his "children". What I mean is that (I believe) Cezanne achieved a new kind of synthesis between different aspects and elements of painting, and his various "descendants" took this fragile whole apart, running away with one or another part of it (and often making it into an all too easy "recipe" for painting-making). So, for example, Cubism (especially the analytical cubism) evidently descends from Cezanne's achievements, but it's very much debatable whether Cezanne himself would have accepted its flat planes without colour modulations as a painting (as we know, he intensely disliked even Gauguin's flat shapes). </span><br />
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What I want to do is go back to the <b>original synthesis</b>, to try and understand how this all works together in composing a painting. As of now, I am planning a two-months series of (weekly) posts on Cezanne's composition (to be completed before my two-weeks vacation in September), but it may be continued later. </span><br />
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As one of my starting points, I will be using <b><a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/C%C3%A9zanne_s_Composition.html?id=0owOFFLVLqEC" target="_blank">Erle Loran's classic study</a> into Cezanne's composition</b>, and I have chosen this particular version of Mont Saint Victoire (above) for my introductory post, because Erle Loran uses it to introduce the contrast between Cezanne's way of constructing the space and the (generalized) impressionistic one. The contrast is both in the result (the structure of space within the picture plane) and in the method, the pictorial elements Cezanne uses to construct his paintings.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wgCynnP5o-w/UdOOPBQKEfI/AAAAAAAAeMw/mC-pnJdqn80/s529/Renoir.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wgCynnP5o-w/UdOOPBQKEfI/AAAAAAAAeMw/mC-pnJdqn80/s529/Renoir.jpg" height="266" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.barnesfoundation.org/collections/art-collection/object/4997/montagne-sainte-victoire-paysage" target="_blank">Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Paysage)<br />54.4 x 65.5 cm. 1889. </a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The contrast is particularly evident in this case, because </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Pierre-Auguste Renoir </b>happened to paint the exact same subject from a nearly identical location and in a decidedly impressionistic way. Here is his painting on the right (it's not the only one Renoir did of this motive, nor the strongest one, but that just strengthens Loran's points). The same trees in the foreground, the same mountain in the background, the same sky -- and yet an entirely different painting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Now that you have seen these two paintings independently, I'll put them side by side, to make it easier to compare them: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"></span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y6mF_4rZtas/UdTGaStW2YI/AAAAAAAAeTE/D2jOpRGRoXs/s1589/Together.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y6mF_4rZtas/UdTGaStW2YI/AAAAAAAAeTE/D2jOpRGRoXs/s1589/Together.jpg" height="240" width="640" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">You may want to take a moment to compare them yourself and note the differences. One question in particular is intriguing, and if you take a moment to answer it now, before reading any further, and give your answer in comments, I would be forever grateful. So, here is the question:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">If you try to focus your attention Renoir's version (on the left), does your eye stay there or does it tend to (unintentionally) move towards Cezanne's version (on the right)? </span></b></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The concept of <b>"eye movement"</b> plays a very prominent part in textbook discussions of composition, suggesting that a painter can "guide" the viewer's eye into and within their painting; the point is (usually) to provide a clear path for the viewer's eye, which would return them back into your painting once they reach the edge of the picture plane. In this theory, there are two worst things a painter can do: </span><br />
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><b>not to "open"</b> such a path at all, and </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><b>to lead the viewer's eye <i>out</i></b> of one's own painting (and, if it hangs in a gallery or in a museum, right into the next painting, which might just happen to be by another painter...). </span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">So, my question above really is about whether (as suggested by Loran) Renoir commits the second sin here, and leads your eye diagonally from lower left towards the blues of upper right and directly towards Cezanne's painting, without any provisions for returning your eye back into other areas of his own painting? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Personally, I am more than a bit sceptic towards the whole theory of "guiding viewer's eye". I believe the concept of eye movement is often confused with a related, but quite different notion of <b>perceived subtle movement <i>within</i> the painting's space</b>. Paintings, you see, are a bit like rivers, but in reverse: the water of a river might seem to just be there, but, in reality, it moves and changes all the time; paintings, on the other hand, can create an illusion of movement(s) within them, their own dynamics and tension, even though they are "in reality" very stable and are just hanging there on the wall. But the tension, and the accompanying vitality and energy, only emerge if there are competing movements <i><b>in different directions</b></i>. And Cezanne was really a genius in creating these competing movements. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">What happens here, I think, is that Renoir has created a strong movement <b>in one direction</b>, away from the viewer and the picture plane and into the depth of space, primarily by his use of <i>aerial perspective</i>: receding blues in the background, protruding yellows and greens in the foreground, and softening and disappearance of distant edges (see how the mountain merges into the sky?) The picture quietly but surely <i>moves away</i> from the viewer and into the distant space. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">On the picture plane, though, it means <b>upward movement</b>. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Since there is a point of interest in the foreground (people), and a major dark area against lights on the right, the movement becomes diagonal, from lower left to upper right, and sinks somewhere into the lighter part of the sky behind the mountain, as though into a hole in space. There is nothing moving back from there, the whole painting nearly dissolves into the thin air: no tension, no energy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Cezanne also uses aerial perspective in colour to make the mountain recede into the sky, but his treatment of edges is evidently very different. There is one particularly important area where the contrast is palpable, the right-hand edge of the mountain:</span><br />
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<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Renoir nearly completely "loses" this edge, and lightens this area of the mountain so that it fuses into the sky, facilitating his diagonal movement into the depth of the sky. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Cezanne strongly and distinctly <b>draws</b> this edge with his brush, in a radical departure from the impressionist approach to realistic depiction of nature: such lines do not exist in nature. Within the picture plane, though, it creates a strong counter-movement, back towards the foreground trees. </span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is only one of many ways Cezanne employs to construct his space and create the tension. I will return to other elements of this composition next week.</span></div>
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Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-55383547259305629912013-07-02T12:58:00.000-07:002013-07-02T12:58:12.521-07:00The meaning is in the verse: introduction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h3>
What this series is about</h3>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zx6NqeNRAK4/UDfYsJRC9GI/AAAAAAAAQ00/95E7_C27KJU/s584/1412.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zx6NqeNRAK4/UDfYsJRC9GI/AAAAAAAAQ00/95E7_C27KJU/s584/1412.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lena Levin. Shakespeare's sonnet 18. 20"x20". Oil on linen.</td></tr>
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This post opens a two-months long <b>introduction into rhythmic qualities of English verse</b>, with a particular focus on the English iambic pentameter and Shakespeare's verse. If you have ever wondered what makes a poem a poem (as opposed to prose), what are the general laws that govern Shakespeare's verse, what does it mean that the meaning can be "in the verse" (as opposed to just in its language), what is the poem's rhythm and how it relates to its language, its time, and its author, and, more generally, how to read a poem, this series is for you.<br />
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My own, urgently personal, interest in poetic rhythms derives from a belief that they hold a key to <b>rhythmic qualities of painting</b>, one of the painting most mysterious and intriguing effects. Rhythms in poetry, albeit incredibly complex, are far better studied and understood than rhythms in painting. There are, of course, lots of differences between poems and paintings, but I feel like there are general rhythmic laws that lie far deeper than any differences, and that's what I am after, ultimately.<br />
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Lots of data for this series will come from books and papers that are barely accessible to a reader without some statistical and linguistic background; but my plan is to make this series readable to anyone interested in poetry and where its melodies come from. <b>Want to help me?</b> Please ask questions if anything (anything at all) sounds obscure and hard to understand.<br />
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<h3>
The first example</h3>
To start with a bang, here is one of the most well-known sonnets in the history of English verse, <b>Shakespeare's sonnet 18</b>:<br />
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<i>Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?<br />Thou art more lovely and more temperate:<br />Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,<br />And summer's lease hath all too short a date: </i></blockquote>
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<i>Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,<br />And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;<br />And every fair from fair sometime declines,<br />By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed; </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>But thy eternal summer shall not fade<br />Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;<br />Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,<br />When in eternal lines to time thou growest: </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i> So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,<br /> So long lives this and this gives life to thee. </i></blockquote>
<a href="http://www.touchpress.com/titles/shakespeares-sonnets/18/Shall-I-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day/" target="_blank">Click here to listen to David Tennant reading this sonnet</a>.<br />
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This poem has its own individual rhythm, created by the interactions on all levels of language:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Phonological <b>word stress</b>, and the distribution of monosyllabic and longer words within the poem. This is how word stress is distributed in line 8 (stressed syllables are in CAPITAL letters), so you can see how unstressed and stressed syllables regularly alternate, creating the general "beat" of the line:</li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>By </i>CHANCE<i> or </i>NAT<i>ure's </i>CHANG<i>ing </i>COURSE<i> un</i>TRIMMED</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><b style="font-weight: bold;">Phrasal accent</b><b>, </b>which strengthens or weakens stresses on different words depending on their prominence within a sentence or a phrase; in the same line, three of the stressed syllables are "stronger" because of their positions in the overall structure of the phrase (they are shown in bold below):</li>
</ul>
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<i>By </i><b>CHANCE</b><i> or </i>NAT<i>ure's </i>CHANG<i>ing </i><b>COURSE</b><i> un</i><b>TRIMMED</b></blockquote>
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<ul>
<li><b>Grammatical constructions</b>, which determine intonational and semantic units both larger and smaller than the lines, separated by pauses: </li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>And </i>EVE<i>ry </i><b>FAIR</b><i> </i><b>||</b><i> from </i><b>FAIR</b><i> </i>| <i>sometime de</i><b>CLINES</b><i>, </i><b>||</b><br /><i>By </i><b>CHANCE</b><i> \ or </i>NAT<i>ure's </i>CHANG<i>ing </i><b>COURSE \</b><i> un</i><b>TRIMMED</b><i>; </i></blockquote>
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<ul>
<li><b>Internal properties of particular words</b>: grammatical words, like pronouns or auxiliaries, weaken or lose their stress more easily to fit the overall melody than lexical, "content" words, but there are also more intricate differences: for example, <i>gives </i>in the last line is naturally "weakened", but <i>Death </i>in line 11 is unavoidably stressed, creating a sequence of two stressed syllables (DEATH BRAG) and nearly "breaking" the <i>eternal lines</i>.</li>
</ul>
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<h3>
Iambic pentameter </h3>
But all the peculiarities of the individual poem emerge against the background of a general formal law, the metric structure of <b>iambic pentameter</b>. In the most abstract form, this means that each line contains exactly <b>ten</b> syllables, and even syllables are "strong" while odd syllables are "weak". In other words, a line comprises of five bisyllabic units, and the second syllable in each unit is "stronger" (more likely to be stressed) than the first. Return again to this line:<br />
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<i>By </i>CHANCE<i> or </i>NAT<i>ure's </i>CHANG<i>ing </i>COURSE<i> un</i>TRIMMED<i>.. </i><br />
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In this line, the iambic pentameter is implemented in its ideal form: <b>each even ("strong") syllable of the line receives the word stress, and all odd ("weak") syllables are unstressed.</b> This is the general beat of the sonnet, the baseline on which (or rather, on deviations from which) its particular rhythm and melody are based. Had all lines been exactly like that, the poem would have been extremely monotonous and dull, so there are lots of deviations from this <b>abstract metric scheme</b> in the poem's <b>specific, individual rhythm</b>.<br />
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There are several <b>levels of mediation</b> between the general metric scheme and the rhythm of an individual work:<br />
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<ol>
<li>First of all, there is the <b>language</b>, and its natural metric tendencies. Some languages aren't suited for metric schemes based on word stress in general, and for iambic pentameter in particular; those that do allow for this type of poetry, do it in slightly different ways, and this determines variations in how the iambic pentameter of an individual language differs from its most abstract scheme. </li>
<li>Then, there is a history of how an individual <b>tradition</b> of iambic verse emerged and evolved, which plays a prominent role in how it sounds and feels in a certain epoch: which deviations feel like "breaking" the verse, which are easily accommodated, etc. </li>
<li>The accepted variant of iambic verse may depend on the <b>genre</b> of poetry in which it is employed (e.g. love poetry is one thing, and comedy is another).</li>
<li>And last but not least, there are individual rhythmic qualities of <b>poets</b>, and their own rhythmic evolution (e.g. Donne's rhythms differ from Shakespeare's rhythms, and the rhythms of young Shakespeare differ from those found in his more mature work).</li>
</ol>
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I will discuss all these levels in detail later in this series. For now, let's return to our first example. </div>
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<h3>
Looking for meaning in the rhythm</h3>
In what follows, I took the liberty of marking up the sonnet to indicate how its own rhythmic structure relates to the abstract iambic pentameter:<br />
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<span style="background-color: cyan;">Shall</span><span style="background-color: red;"> I </span><i>com</i>PARE<span style="background-color: white;"> thee </span><span style="color: blue;"><b>to</b></span> <i>a</i> SUM<i>mer's</i> DAY?<br />
<span style="background-color: cyan;">Thou </span><span style="background-color: red;">art </span><span style="background-color: white;">more </span>LOVE<i>ly</i> <span style="color: blue;"><b>and</b></span> <span style="background-color: cyan;">more </span>TEM<i>pe</i><span style="color: blue;"><b>rate</b></span>:<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #e06666;">Rough</span> WINDS <i>do</i> SHAKE <i>the</i> DARL<i>ing</i> BUDS <i>of</i> MAY,<br />
<i>And</i> SUM<i>mer's</i> LEASE <span style="background-color: white;"><i>hath</i> all </span><i>too</i> SHORT <i>a</i> DATE:<br />
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Sometime <i>too</i> HOT <i>the</i> EYE <i>of</i> HEAV<i>en</i> SHINES,<br />
<i>And</i> OFTen <span style="color: blue;"><b>is</b></span> <i>his</i> GOLD <i>com</i>PLEX<i>ion</i> DIMMED;<br />
<i>And</i> EVE<i>ry</i> FAIR <i>from</i> FAIR sometime <i>de</i>CLINES,<br />
<i>By</i> CHANCE <i>or</i> NAT<i>ure's</i> CHANG<i>ing</i> COURSE <i>un</i>TRIMMED;<br />
<br />
<i>But</i> <span style="background-color: red;"><b>thy</b> </span>eTERNal SUM<i>mer</i> <span style="background-color: white;">shall</span> <i>not</i> FADE<br />
<i>Nor</i> LOSE <i>po</i>SSESS<i>ion</i> <span style="color: blue;"><b>of</b></span> <i>that</i> FAIR <i>thou</i> OWEST;<br />
<i>Nor</i> <span style="color: blue;"><b>shall</b></span> <span style="color: red;"><b>Death</b></span> BRAG <i>thou</i> WAND<i>er'st</i> <b><span style="color: blue;">in</span></b> <i>his</i> SHADE,<br />
<i>When</i> <span style="color: blue;"><b>in</b></span> <i>e</i>TERN<i>al</i> LINES <i>to</i> TIME <i>thou</i> GROWEST:<br />
<br />
<i>So</i> LONG <i>as</i> MEN <i>can</i> BREATH <i>or</i> EYES <i>can</i> SEE,<br />
<i>So</i> LONG <span style="background-color: cyan;">lives</span> THIS <span style="color: blue;"><b>and</b></span> <span style="background-color: red;">this </span><span style="background-color: cyan;">gives</span> LIFE <i>to</i> THEE.<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>"Strong" (even) syllables which unambiguously receive word stress are printed in CAPITAL letters, "weak" (odd) syllables which are unambiguously unstressed, are <i>in italics</i>. In this "area" of the sonnet, its abstract meter and its specific language coincide and support one another, creating the overal rhythmic structure.</li>
<li>The <span style="color: blue;"><b>blue font</b></span> indicates syllables that are in "strong" positions, but cannot be stressed under any circumstances because of their linguistic nature; unavoidable "dips" in the overall rhythmic structure; these give the sonnet its variety and melody. As you see, there are quite a lot of such "dips": the poem easily maintains its rhythm even with these stresses "missing". </li>
<li>The <b><span style="color: red;">red font</span></b> indicates syllables which are lexically stressed, but are in the "weak" positions (i.e. they would be unstressed in an "ideal" iambic poem). There are only two cases like that: one, in line 3 ("Rough winds"), easily adjusts itself to the rhythm of the sonnet, because monosyllabic adjectives naturally weaken their stress before monosyllabic nouns: the stress on "rough" in this context is likely to be weakened even outside the context of a poem. The other one, though, <b><span style="color: red;">Death</span></b> in line 11, is undoubtedly much more prominent: this deviation is easily audible and sounds like Death's attempt to "break" the poem intended to protect the poet's beloved from him. </li>
<li>Finally, I highlighted the syllables which can be both stressed and unstressed depending on the intended meaning (or rather, the intended information structure of the meaning): <span style="background-color: cyan;">blue</span> indicates syllables where the rhythm suggests no stress, and <span style="background-color: red;">red</span><span style="background-color: white;"> shows syllables stressed by the verse as it were. </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="background-color: white;">It is in this latter, highlighted, "domain" of a poem that <b>the verse dictates the meaning</b>. I believe the most interesting point comes in line 9, </span><span style="background-color: red;">thy</span><span style="background-color: white;"> <i>e</i>TER<i>nal</i> SUM<i>mer</i>: in a natural, prosaic reading, based on language alone <i>thy </i>would be unstressed<i>,</i> making it into a weak, relatively insignificant possessive pronoun, subordinated to the noun phrase. But the metric scheme suggests stressing this pronoun, which makes it as semantically prominent as the adjective, as though putting a comma after the pronoun; as though <i>eternity</i> is a natural consequence of association with <i>thou</i> of the sonnet. This is a completely different semantics, and this is exactly how <a href="http://www.touchpress.com/titles/shakespeares-sonnets/18/Shall-I-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day/" target="_blank">David Tennant reads the line</a>, following the verse rather than the language. </span><div>
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white;">Another clear case of the verse dictating how exactly the overall sentence should be read and understood is in the last line of the sonnet. I will leave it to you, though, to think about how it works out here. </span><br /><ul>
</ul>
<br />
<br /></div>
Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-34583880359727032212013-06-28T17:26:00.002-07:002013-06-28T17:26:51.512-07:00What to expect from this blog in the future<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oaS8xSPrQJw/Uc4f4RyTRII/AAAAAAAAeIg/Mr9_t1P7_yE/s1367/1829.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oaS8xSPrQJw/Uc4f4RyTRII/AAAAAAAAeIg/Mr9_t1P7_yE/s1367/1829.jpg" height="330" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://bobcat/shop/Landscapes/4087" target="_blank">Erase the random lines away: Bridge. 16"x20". Oil on canvas panel.</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">It's been nearly two months since I've kept the new schedule for this blog, and I think it has served its purpose:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">I have gotten (back) into the habit of <b>daily writing</b>, and even enhanced it, insofar as I haven't been just writing for myself, but also editing.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">I've returned to reading more, and have a clearer understanding of <b>connections</b> between seemingly disparate aspects of my life and work.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Most importantly, <b>the concept and purpose of this blog</b> have <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/06/studio-news-picking-my-battle.html" target="_blank">crystallized themselves in my mind</a>, and with that, a better understanding of its appropriate format. </span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: large;">Two series will stay more or less as they are, no doubt about it:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">The weekly <b>"Sonnets in colour" series</b>: the most optimistic estimate that it will take me at least three more years to work through my sonnets series, so it's doesn't really feel like a "project" or "series" anymore (even a long one), but rather as a life. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">The weekly, or, occasionally, bi-weekly, <b>"Studio news"</b> series: a summary and examination of my studio work, its ups and downs, its insights and its confusion; and occasionally, overviews of <a href="http://lenalevin.com/" target="_blank">my website</a> updates. </span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">As for the rest, here is an intermediate plan for the remaining months of summer:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">A series about <b>the rhythmic qualities of the English verse</b>, and the Shakespearean verse in particular, loosely based on Marina Tarlinskaya's work. More or less, it will replace the ad hoc "Reading log" series. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">A series about <b>Cezanne's composition</b>, loosely based on Erle Loran's book and Rilke's letters on Cezanne. This will be the summer equivalent of the "In Studio with Masters" series. </span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">The idea I will be thus testing is a <b>blog-based equivalent of semester- or quarter-length courses</b> on art history and art appreciation. I feel that while a blog post might provide the modern, internet-based, piecemeal format (an informal equivalent of a university lecture/seminar), the two-four months series focusing on particular topics give more continuity and educational value. That is, if you follow a series, it will give you an opportunity for in-depth knowledge on the topic and an opening and a structure for your own further studies. Meanwhile, I will be thinking of more art-educational series for the autumn (for the time being, I entertain the idea of a study into colour theory and its applications and an "In Studio with Masters" series on Henri Matisse). </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">I did think (briefly) about splitting this blog (back) into several ones, corresponding to individual series, but I don't believe that would be a good idea. After all, the current wisdom is that wandering between seemingly disconnected areas is a source and fuel of human creativity, isn't it? </span></div>
<br />
<br /><br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-135251176241318612013-06-26T16:12:00.000-07:002013-06-26T16:12:08.847-07:00In search of the essence of painting (Matisse and de Heem)<span style="font-size: large;">Several weeks ago, I began a little study of Matisse's still life after Jan de Heem's "Table of desserts", which has turned into something much longer and deeper than I expected, and even involved my own painting studies. Here are these paintings again, side by side. If you are interested in larger images, <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/05/in-studio-with-masters-matisse-and-de.html" target="_blank">click here</a>.
</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fuIfYiJGap8/Uctpj0_DQhI/AAAAAAAAeD8/VpIhvoVv-fo/s1600/Together.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fuIfYiJGap8/Uctpj0_DQhI/AAAAAAAAeD8/VpIhvoVv-fo/s1600/Together.jpg" height="242" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">To conclude this adventure, which I have shared with you in six blog posts so far, I want to summarize what I have understood and learned as a result. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">Here are the major steps of my journey: </span><br />
<b><ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The<a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/05/in-studio-with-masters-matisse-and-de.html" target="_blank"> initial comparison o</a>f two paintings</b>, and the questions I wanted to explore: </span></li>
</ul>
</b><ol><ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">What are Matisse's <b>"modern principle of construction", </b>and </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">How and, more importantly, <b>why</b> has he changed the abstract structure of the painting?</span></li>
</ul>
</ol>
<span style="font-size: large;">It is obvious from the first sight that Matisse <i>reveals the internal geometric structure</i> of the painting, hidden in de Heem's original; and also that <i>he has moved two major triangles</i> of de Heem's composition upwards, so that their apexes are no longer located within the picture plane, but outside, above its upper edge. It also seems that <i>turning the lute towards the viewer</i>, showing its strings, is part of the same overall change Matisse is after. However, I don't really know at that point what this change is all about: the explicit geometric grid can be preliminarily understood as a sign of <b>modernity</b>, but the reason for moving the triangles remains a mystery to me. </span><ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">The study leads me to learn <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/05/in-studio-with-masters-jan-davidsz-de.html" target="_blank">more about <b>de Heem's life and work</b>, and discover the conspicuously special place this particular still life has in this context</a>: as a "bridge", an apparent attempt of <b>synthesis</b> between two quite distinct traditions he belonged to, the Dutch Golden Age and the Flemish Barocco (and possibly, two lives he lived). Follow the link above if you want to look at some of his other works and see for yourself.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/05/in-studio-with-masters-matisse-vs-de.html" target="_blank">Returning to the comparison between de Heem and Matisse, I focus on the locus of simplicity vs. complexity</a> within two compositions: de Heem foregrounds <b>the complexity of detail and form</b> within the still life set-up against the backdrop of simple and straightforward overall design of value areas; Matisse simplifies the things being painted, <b>moving the complexity "outwards"</b>, into the overall design of the picture plane. One result is that de Heem's composition is <b>endocentric</b> and somewhat downward-oriented, "closed" within the picture plane with a clear area of focal interest in the lower part, whereas Matisse's construction is <b>exocentric</b>, moving outwards from the center in all directions and outside the picture plane, with no clear foci of interest within. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">Armed with the understanding I have gained so far, <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/06/still-life-after-matisse-after-de-heem.html" target="_blank">I engage in a <b>"practical" analysis</b> of this remarkable interaction between two masters</a>: I took two (roughly) impressionistic, and fairly similar to one another, still lifes of my own, and attempted to push one of them towards de Heem's principles of composition, and the other one, towards Matisse's. The utmost relevance of the overall value design becomes even clearer in the process; I understand better the <b>formal essence</b> of Matisse's modifications, but not its <b>inner significance</b> (yet). Here are the results of this work again, with original studies in the top row, and the new versions, in the bottom row:</span></li>
</ul>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VYT3tCvawUE/UcEQc0T80TI/AAAAAAAAdqo/GyPu9vtTa5A/s1600/Collage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VYT3tCvawUE/UcEQc0T80TI/AAAAAAAAdqo/GyPu9vtTa5A/s1600/Collage.jpg" height="640" width="640" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">And here comes the breakthrough: t<a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-studio-with-masters-invisible-edges.html" target="_blank">he work on my own still lifes leads me to the discovery of a <b>"hidden"</b> substance of de Heem's painting</a>, represented by the heap of books behind the drapery, near the apex of the right-hand major triangle. This discovery sheds new light on the synthetic, intermediate position of this work in de Heem's ouvre; as though an expression of an <i>uneasy, hidden compromise</i>. It also reveals an additional change made by Matisse: he downplayed the books on the right, but decidedly <b>opened up the landscape</b> behind the window, near the top of the left-hand triangle, barely visible in de Heem's original. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: large;">In <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-studio-with-masters-composition-and.html" target="_blank">the last post of the series</a>, where I show the final images of my own still lifes and lament neglecting in my analysis (initially, at least) the fundamental, unbreakable link between <b>meaning and form</b> in painting, between a paintings' <b>inner harmony and outer construction</b>. </span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;">But now, at least, the link has revealed itself with utmost clarity: just think of these still lifes in terms of the oppositions between <b>open(ed) vs. close(d), reveal vs. hide, outwards vs. inwards</b>, and their formal structures and their inner significance come into the focus of awareness, and, what's more essential in the domain of painting, become indistinguishable. </span></div>
<ol>
</ol>
<div>
<br /></div>
Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-22629568907396508962013-06-25T12:40:00.000-07:002013-06-25T12:40:26.701-07:00Sonnet 41: Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eG1dXhKBIiQ/UciBHsGWY7I/AAAAAAAAd6g/alQFWq5xFrU/s1600/1844.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eG1dXhKBIiQ/UciBHsGWY7I/AAAAAAAAd6g/alQFWq5xFrU/s1600/1844.jpg" height="640" width="624" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sonnet 41: where thou art forced to break a twofold truth. 20"x20". Oil on linen. 2013</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">William Shakespeare. Sonnet 41</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,<br />When I am sometime absent from thy heart,<br />Thy beauty, and thy years full well befits,<br />For still temptation follows where thou art.<br />Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,<br />Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;<br />And when a woman woos, what woman's son<br />Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed?<br />Ay me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,<br />And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,<br />Who lead thee in their riot even there<br />Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth:<br /> Hers by thy beauty tempting her to thee,<br /> Thine by thy beauty being false to me.</span></i></blockquote>
<i><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i>
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://bobcat/gal/sonnets4/"></a>
</span><br />
<a href="http://www.touchpress.com/titles/shakespeares-sonnets/41/Those-pretty-wrongs-that-liberty-commits/"><span style="font-size: large;">Sam Alexander reading this sonnet</span></a><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The drama of the sonnets sequence is still stuck within the
impossible love triangle the speaker finds himself in: two of his
lovers, the young man and a lady, have found their way into each other's
arms, thus breaking the <em>twofold truth</em>, i.e. betraying his trust twice. And if <a href="http://lenalevin.com/gal/sonnets4/6">the previous sonnet attacked the very word, <em>love</em>, turning it into <em>lascivious</em></a>, this one focuses on the ambiguity of <b>agency</b> in love's <em>pretty wrongs</em> and deconstructs the concept of <b>free will</b>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The agency in committing <em>pretty wrongs</em> is ascribed to a variety of forces beyond young man's apparent control: <em>liberty</em>, <em>youth</em>, <em>temptation</em>, <em>a woman</em>, and, most importantly, <em>beauty</em>.
It's only at the turn between the second and third quatrains that the
speaker appeals to the young man's ability to resist these forces, if
only for the sake of being loyal to himself. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The first hint of it comes when he uses the expression <em>woman's son</em>
instead of "man" in the seventh line: it links the sonnet to his own
poem, "Venus and Adonis", and thus suggests the possibility to resist
even the goddess of love herself. The second one is hidden in the
unexpected change of agency in the next line:</span><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></em>
<span style="font-size: large;"><em>what woman's son</em> // <em>Will sourly leave her till <b>he</b> have prevailed</em>. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">There seems to be a continuing disagreement between editors and
commentators of the sonnets with respect to the pronoun shown in bold
above (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Sonnets-Yale-Nota-Bene/dp/0300085060">Stephen Booth, p. 201</a>): <b>he</b> in this context is how the sonnet was first published, but many editors replace it with <b>she</b>,
since that would seem more logical: the one who woos should be the one
who, eventually, prevails, not the other way round. And yet, this logic
doesn't seem so logical in the context of the poem's play with agency,
especially just before the speaker's appeal to the young man to exercise
his free will in blocking all temptations of youth and beauty: here,
the transfer of agency to <em>him</em> by the end of the second quatrain prepares the third one. <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0674637127">Helen Vendler (pp. 214-215)</a>
reads this appeal, this acknowledgement of the young man's agency, in
terms of sincerity "breaking through" the initial insincere excuses.
What I find more interesting here is how Shakespeare's treatment of
"free will" here agrees with what <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140230122?ref_=sr_1_1&qid=1372188501&sr=8-1&keywords=the%20user%20illusion">the modern neuroscience tells us about it</a>:
the impulses for our actions really originate beyond the reach of our
conscious awareness and direct control; but we can still veto them (<em>chide</em>
them away) consciously if we catch them in time. Just like when you
find yourself in front of an open fridge, with your arm outstretched
towards something you haven't had any conscious intent to consume: this
is the moment when you can still <em>chide</em> the initial impulse that
has led you into temptation; this is the moment to exercise you free
will. So I don't believe this change of agency in the poem is about
sincerity vs. insincere excuses. I think this description comes from the
lifetime of attentive observations of one's inner life, the internal
workings of mind: the same treasure that still keeps Shakespeare
relevant to our lives, even after all these centuries. <br />
</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In any event, in the drama of sonnets sequence, the power of veto hasn't been exercised, and <em>beauty</em> <em>breaks</em> the <em>twofold truth</em>.
This is the fascinating idea which I've tried to convey in this
painting, with its explicit, unresolved conflicts between the image and
the picture plane, between the colour and the line. </span><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></i>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3006864207272078297.post-90159375142554045972013-06-21T13:06:00.001-07:002013-06-21T13:06:50.825-07:00Reading log: Rainer Maria Rilke. Auguste Rodin<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gk0X3VtW6VA/UcPD0b7ldUI/AAAAAAAAdy4/5SHWN5XjNsU/s1600/682px-Monument_to_Balzac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gk0X3VtW6VA/UcPD0b7ldUI/AAAAAAAAdy4/5SHWN5XjNsU/s1600/682px-Monument_to_Balzac.jpg" height="400" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Auguste Rodin. Monument to Balzak</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: large;">At some point <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Auguste_Rodin.html?id=US4EAAAAYAAJ" target="_blank">in his book</a>, Rilke describes Rodin's work on this monument to Balzak: his multiple preparatory studies, many years of reading and thinking; his search for essence beyond appearances. </span><span style="font-size: large;">I've come to think of Rilke's book as fundamentally the same type of monument, which expresses the essence of one artist's work in another artist's medium. Rodin moved from words to sculpture, Rilke, from sculpture back to words, but both had visited the depths where this difference doesn't really matter any more, and both came back with a representation of the life force itself expressing itself in art. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">And just like Rodin's monument overcomes Balzak's Falstaffian outer appearance to convey the inner essence, so Rilke looks deeper, through and beyond accidental biographical ripples marking the surface of Rodin's outer life, into his inner, solitary life and work as an artist. If you are going to read this book, pick an illustrated edition, or keep your Google image search (or <a href="http://www.rodinmuseum.org/" target="_blank">the Rodin Museum site</a>) open, or better still, read it where you can see the work: the book is filled with descriptions of Rodin's pieces; not "art criticism", but observations of an extraordinarily perceptive viewer dedicated to ultimate precision in words, who also had the advantage of conversations with Rodin himself.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">But if I were to pick a single word to describe this book, it would be <b>silence</b> (maybe <a href="http://lena-levin.blogspot.com/2013/05/silentium-let-my-lips-learn-primordial.html" target="_blank">SILENTIUM</a>): silence, solitude, patience essential for any meaningful work, for any insight; silence as in the lack of noise and meaningless ripples. It is a slow, quiet book, immersed in SILENTIUM; a poet's prose, in which every single word matters and <i>means</i>. And it describes a slow, solitary life of an artist, filled with silence, and thought, and work. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It would be tempting to ascribe the deep quiet of this book, and of this life (as opposed to the noise around us) to their time (as opposed to ours). There may even be some fleeting truth in it, but it's a superficial one. To return to the beginning of this post, it's enough to read some Balzak to know that it was as easy to get trapped in the pointless noise of life in the past as it is now. And it is as essential to find this silence now, in our own lives and in our own time, as it was for Rodin and Rilke. Opening this book, diving into it, is like sinking into this silence, whatever the daily noise around. </span><br />
<br />Elena Maslova-Levinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13864089069797387037noreply@blogger.com0