Stories in painting IV: a path to synthesis

Still life with Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. 30"x20". Oil on linen. In-progress.

This post completes my little story of stories in painting, begun as my answer to +Alexander M Zoltai's question (here are the previous posts of this small series: 1, 2, 3). But it's really not a completion, but rather a new beginning. 

In my previous posts, I've tried to pinpoint (what I feel as) two major underlying forces behind painting's divorce from stories: the overwhelming angst brought about by human-made catastrophes of the last century, and the increasing (and, arguably, misleading) role endless stories play in our inner lives. 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 rationality and intuition, conscious and unconscious, science and religion.     

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 poetry. Not quite "stories", since a poet engages language at another level; and yet, not quite the dog-like absence of stories either. 

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 poem linked to it, by Osip Mandelstam, or rather one quatrain of it:

For the thundering valour of ages to come,
For humanity's noble tribe,
I have lost my cup at ancestors' table,
And my honor, and all my joy.


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.   

Life returned without any reason

Life returned, without any reason (after Boris Pasternak). 14"x11". Oil on linen. 2013.

The concept of being fully present in here and now -- aware, mindful, fully alive in the present moment, 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. 

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. 

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 fully present in the universe by fully withdrawing into one's inner self?       

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 some 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. 

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 sharing 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.

The first is, I believe one needs 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 as necessary to "feed" your inner self with such genuine moments as it is to feed your body with real food. After all, that's the whole point of here and now, 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.      

Secondly, these moments, and this inner state, can be shared; 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 the humankind's shared reservoir of these brightly alive memories. This, I think, was one of the impulses behind the impressionists' movement away from stories and towards "here and now". 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.   

Last (but by no means least), nowadays (thanks to the Impressionists' achievements), the skill of impressionist painting can be learned 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 it is one of the most straightforward and enjoyable paths towards these here and now moments, 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.

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.         

Stories in painting III: like a dog

Paul Cezanne. Compotier, Glass and Apples. 46 x 55 cm. Oil on canvas. 1880.  

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: 1, 2). Another episode of this particular plot in the history of painting: its conscious divorce from "literature" in the age of impressionism. 

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: "He sat there in front of it like a dog, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive." 

A remarkable turn of phrase, "like a dog", isn't it? I believe it means, first and foremost, "story-less": 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.  

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 that is the function of language: thinking, 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 here and now; from being fully alive and present in the moment: like a dog.  

There is also this hypothesis (present in somewhat different forms in different theories) that this inner storyteller's role (however one calls it) 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 here and now.    

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... 

Stories in painting -- II: of gods and humans

This post continues my story of stories in painting, my answer to +Alexander M Zoltai's question in my "All you want to know about painting" series. Here is the first part of this answer, in case you have missed it.

I have approached +Alexander M Zoltai's question ("how do you incorporate a story into one painting") indirectly, by addressing another one: why have stories disappeared from paintings? I will 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 first appeared there.   

The original question makes an implicit assumption (quite natural at this particular juncture in time and space) that one painting represents but one moment in time; 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 nothing to prevent a painter from composing a single painting which would combine many different moments from the same story, thus incorporating multiple points of its plot.  

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, twice: he first approaches an empty throne of his god, and then kneels 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 Julian Jaynes' book, "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind". 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). 

In any event, this type of story telling within a single image 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, "The last day of Pompeii", by Karl Briullov (1830-1833, 465.5 cm × 651 cm):  

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.  

And here is the second one, "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso (1937, 349 cm × 776 cm):

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. 

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.  

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.


  

Stories in painting (I)

The next question in our "All you want to know about painting" series comes from +Alexander M Zoltai

"How do you incorporate a "story" (meaning some sort of "plot") into one painting?" 

A short answer would be "I don't", but it would be a bit like playing Shakespeare's gravedigger ("Upon what grounds? Why, here in Denmark"): as straightforward and honest as it is meaningless. 

The thing is, when I say "I don't", I am referring to a certain tradition of visualizing stories in paintings, the tradition hinted at by the universally recognizable detail above, from Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, 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.  

Here is another famous instance of this tradition, Leonardo's "The Last Supper":

I have chosen this painting for this post because it highlights two key aspects, two opposing sides of this tradition:

• First, the viewer is supposed to know the story (at least to some extent) -- it's not the painter's job to tell 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 it's always a single moment, a climax of the narrative. 
• The compositions are usually complex, multi-figure ones, with some less obvious sub-stories going on all over the picture plane. 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".  

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.         

Mark Rothko. No. 1 Royal read
and blue. 1954.

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). 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. 

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. 

I am illustrating this here with one of Mark Rothko's paintings on the left, 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. We (kind of) don't need or want more nowadays...      

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). 

All you want to know about painting 2: How do you choose your canvases, and a bit more...

This is the second post in "All you want to know about painting" series, where you get to ask any questions, and I promise to answer.

The second question comes from +Tarja Ollas: How do you choose your canvases?

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).

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 found a random photo in a magazine and tried to paint the same scene (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.  

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 must stretch and prime their canvases themselves; otherwise, they are naive beginners at best or eternal amateurs at worst.

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:

1. Studies, studies, studies and practice, practice, practice.
2. Brushes.
3. Paints (pigments).
4. Talent (abilities).
5. Support (canvas, canvas board, paper, whatever).  

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.

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.

All 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.

The first question comes from +Terrill Welch:

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.) -- +Terrill Welch 

Black and white in language (and in our mind's eye)

I believe this is the still life Rilke is talking about in this letter, "Black Marble Clock", 1869-1871, 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 "black and white /.../ behave perfectly colorlike next to the other colors, their equal in every way, as if long acclimatized" (it's the letter dated October 14, 1907 -- if you want to read the whole passage yourself).

And this is, in a sense, exactly as we see black and white "in real life", just as any other colour. In other words, black and white are definitely colours from the point of view of (what is sometimes referred to as) the naive worldview encoded in human languages. 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 white or red; jeans can be blue or black; soot is black, snow is white, grass is green, 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 see 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, we see them, but not so much with our eyes as with our minds, fitting the world our eyes perceive into the conceptual system(s) built into our languages.*

Black and white in optics: light, darkness, wavelengths

And yet, strictly speaking, white and black aren't colours, 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 part of the whole visible spectrum (in the usual terms of colour theory, white and black have no hue, while "normal" colours do).

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. 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 Rembrandt's painting above ("Two old men disputing") 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.

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 darkness, 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, "absolute", ideal whites, 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 white (pun intended).   

Black and white in the eye (photoreceptor cells)

Interestingly, the eye has different "subsystems" for processing "light" and "hue" (rods and cons): 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".

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 this painting on the left, "The magpie", 1869), 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.

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, this strategy robs us from perceiving all the beauty, the rich variety of the surrounding world.

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: "Monet is just an eye, but what an eye".

Black and white: real vs. ideal, material vs. spiritual, form vs. substance

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.

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 spiritual (even divine) idea(l)s, 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 Wassily Kandinsky's critique of Impressionism).


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. 

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* As an aside, there are languages where the basic colour vocabulary splits the whole range into just two words: one stands for black and everything dark & cool; the other, for white and everything warm & light. 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). Go back to text