When the weather gods decree otherwise!

There are definitely times when plein air yields to the weather gods - my eagerly anticipated sojourn on Sapelo Island is off, victim of the steady downpours we have all been - or will be - experiencing along the Atlantic coast. Ah well! Maybe in January...

Meanwhile, in between battling with computers to prepare art exhibition proposals (when the main computer gives up the ghost, courtesy of local inept computer "experts"), I am being constantly reminded of the elegant circularity of events in life. The links that come around, even fifty years later, to make a coherent, constructive addition to present life, always surprise and delight me. They are frequent enough that they require exploration in silverpoint drawing(s), I think. And the important theme running through all these is longevity - you have to live long enough to see the links and re-links happening. The Chinese symbol of longevity is the bamboo - how suitable and elegant. The bamboo family is amazingly diverse, but universally beautiful. The Chinese and Japanese brush paintings and prints of bamboos come always to mind as somehow the light and shade, delicacy and strength and the restraint in foliage have been so wonderfully recorded over the centuries by their artists. An image, for instance from the amazing collections from the Ten Bamboo Studio, shows bamboo leaves drawn with a single line with fine, fine branches. It is so remarkable that you can almost hear the wind rustling through the leaves.

The Studio of the Ten Bamboos produced an album of woodcuts, images engraved on wooden plates and then printed, which is regarded as the most successful example of printing in the 17th century in China. The master engraver, Hou Yue-ts'ong, turned to art after serving in government in Nanking. He gathered a group of painter friends and together, they composed an album of the works of famous artists.Working in the Studio of the Ten Bamboos, they started work probably in 1619 to create this album with its eight parts. Printing the images in one, two or three colours, they grouped up to twenty images in each section, under the headings - fruits, birds, bamboos, stones, etc. Poems were paired with the images too. The first complete opus of more than 180 illustrations and the same number of pages of text apparently appeared in 1643. Alas, no complete editions remain but those that do are regarded as marvels. The publisher himself described the books as "a marvel of calligraphy... The paintings are poems, and the poems are paintings. They bear the spirit and the reflection of nature..."

The Manchu invasion of Nanking saw Hou Yue-ts'ong's workshop burned and many of the album's plates destroyed. Plates were re-engraved and the album was later reprinted in both China and Japan, but never again were the woodcuts of such high quality in the later editions. Thus the early editions, such as the one I alluded to of the bamboo, are held in very high esteem. Some of the prints are held at the British Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and others in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Having planted bamboo myself and watched them grow - slowly and majestically - it seems only appropriate if I can use them in silverpoint drawings exploring longevity and the magical circularity of life. Now, if I can get the time...

Making Others See

Every artist knows the excitement of seeing something, discovering something or thinking of something that can then be translated into a work of art. The greater the excitement, the more impassioned the work and frequently, the better the results. Yet those results are then out in the wide world for each viewer to interpret and understand. And the path to achieving memorable art for viewers can be long and arduous.

Edgar Degas remarked, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." This wise and oh so experienced artist knew that that transformative alchemy needs somehow to come into play amidst the excitement of creation. His skill and innovative methods in choice of composition - often daring indeed for the time with their nod to Japanese woodcuts - allowed him to direct the viewer's gaze in almost unconscious fashion. He also commented, "No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament I know nothing." As he grew older, he would work and rework compositions, trying out parts and juxtaposing them in different fashion, seeking to express movement, psychological impact, social distinctions, but always mindful of what he wished the viewer to appreciate. Chance was not in his methodology of art making.






Look at these two works with their bold, unusual compositions. On the left is an 1886 pastel, Woman Bathing (image courtesy of the Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT).

On the right is a circa 1888 oil painting, Dancers at the Barre, belonging to the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. In each case, Degas is playing with the viewer, directing the eye like an orchestra director conducts the musicians. If you pull the works apart and analyse each one, there are all sorts of odd shapes of limbs, strange angles of bodies, tipped lines. He is using almost hieroglyphic forms to convey what he wants us to see. Part of the influence in later works is also photography, a medium that Degas embraced from the 1870s onwards. The camera's eye allows even more radical cropping and organisation of space than did the Japanese woodcut tradition, and Degas used these possibilities to full advantage, often in multi-layered compositions.

Part of his way of creating art, especially as he grew older, was to rely on his memory or on the small working sculptures he created of ballerinas, refining and refining the marks and gestures, in the same way that ballet dancers practise and practise movements. I read that he once said that were he to set up an art school, he would house it all under one roof, a building with six floors. On the top floor, he would put the novices to start drawing from the model. As the students progressed, he would move them downstairs, floor by floor. When they were at their most proficient, they would be on the ground floor, and that meant that in order to see the original model, they would actually have to clamber back up the stairs to the sixth floor. By this, he implied that memory is critical to an artist. Until you have practised, practised and re-practised until your art-making has become indelibly part of your inner being, you cannot then devote your attention to organising your artwork in seeming spontaneity but in very purposeful fashion for the maximum effect on viewers.

There are, coincidentally, a number of interesting exhibitions currently on display about Edgar Degas and different aspects of his artistic endeavours. Perhaps the most unusual sounds to be that of Degas and the Nude, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. At the Phillips Collection, there is Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint, while at the Royal Academy, London, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement. Lucky viewers can savour of being skilfully "made to see" what Degas wanted them to see.

Art and life

Scrolling through the amazing amount of mail received on the Web, I sometimes come across an image of a painting or drawing that stops me in my tracks. Just as when you round the corner in a museum and come face to face with a work of art that takes your breath away...

Yesterday, I was reading the daily Art Knowledge newsletter and there was the image of a painting I had always loved, Rogier van der Weyden's St. Joseph, done about 1445. I know it from having seen it in the wonderful Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, where it is hung with another part of the original altarpiece, the painting of St. Catherine. Her painting is lovely, but it is the tempera painting of St. Joseph which is breathtaking. Van der Weyden depicts an elderly, thoughtful man whose powerful expressiveness is remarkable. His portrait, direct and detailed, even to the whispy stubble on his chin and the lined, reflective face, depicts him three-quarters face, as if he were hesitating and thoughtful just before he turned to face one and say something gentle and considered. The Gothic architecture and slight landscape behind him are neutral and elegantly refined, a perfect complement to the directness of the portrait.

As I gazed at the digital image of St. Joseph, I thought of the quote I had found when Henry Miller wrote that "art teaches nothing except the significance of life". This portrait is a supreme example of that.

The portrait was being reproduced as it is presently being exhibited at the opening exhibition of an enlarged and updated Vander Kelen-Mertens municipal museum in Leuvens, Belgium. The link to Leuvens for Rogier van der Weyden is important - he apparently painted one of his most celebrated pieces there, the Descent from the Cross, another amazing work which is in the Prado, Madrid. Not only did van der Weyden achieve paintings of refinement and luminosity whose human dramas reach out to us across some six and a half centuries, but he also left us a work which I particularly love as a silverpoint artist. At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, there is a wonderful self-portrait as St Luke done about 1440. He is making a drawing for his painting of the Virgin, in a setting he apparently copied from Jan van Eyck's Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. And he is making a silverpoint drawing....something I don't believe was depicted by any other artist.