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I had recently watched several of the delightful videos made by John Thorton about his friend, the Seattle based painter Kurt Solmssen .
I was intrigued and arranged for an interview using skype with webcams on our computers where he talked at length about his background and work. Seeing each other face to face on the computer helped turn the interview towards being more of a conversation than a formal interview. I would like to again thank Kurt from taking the time to do this and to share his words about his art and life. Kurt Solmssem shows at the George Billis Gallery in NYC and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

LG
What are some formative experience that shaped who you are as a painter. How has your work evolved over the years?

KS Well, I didn’t go to art school until I was twenty years old. I’d always been interested in art, but never really painted until right before that. I decided to go to art school. I had started painting on my own and realized, Hey, maybe I’d be good at this and I really enjoy it

So, I looked around at some art schools, and I saw the brochure for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In there they had work by Ben Kamihira, Sidney Goodman, Arthur De Costa, Lou Sloan, Bruce Samuelson. I really liked the work a lot, and it was my hometown, so I ended up going there.

And in those days, the school was in a hotel building, the Belgravia Hotel. And after a couple of years, [the students] could apply and get a studio, which was basically a hotel room with its own bathroom and a bathtub. It was really nice. And the teachers. For example, Ben Kamihira had a suite of hotel rooms in this building. He had models come in. He lived there some of the time. It was a great experience to see these great artists at work. Sidney Goodman was around. Those influences were great. Lou Sloan. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him.

video (part 1 of 2) by John Thorton about Kurt Solmssen

The Yellow House / Winter, Oil 2010 25″ x 28″

LG No, I don’t know him.

KS He taught a lot of people how to paint landscapes at the Pennsylvania Academy. So, I learned a lot from him going out on painting trips. You know, the palette that I have now is pretty much influenced a lot by him.

I just liked working outdoors, just the physical aspect of it. To make it a short answer, if I could get the results I wanted by working in the studio, I wouldn’t work outside. I just found that what I could get from being outdoors, the information that I could get and just the physical thing about being there, was what really made me enjoy that. And I liked getting out of the school studio where there were fifty people with easels. It didn’t feel like I was making art as much as… Or maybe I’m just a bit of a loner. I don’t know.

I was influenced [early on] by the Pennsylvania landscape painters, who did a lot of winter landscapes, like Willis Redfield. He would do these big paintings in the wintertime all at once, large scale paintings. And those were some of my early influences.

LG I’ll have to check. I’m not familiar with him.

KS He did these really amazing things all at once, in really cold temperatures.

KS And Daniel Garber was another one.  And George Nick’s work, I saw. A friend of mine, Doug Martenson. He’s another person you might want to look up, Doug Martenson.

He teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy now. He would have George Nick’s painting cards up. The paintings of trucks and so forth. When I first saw Fairfield Porter’s work, I had been painting for a few years. I really responded to those, because they were about his family, his domestic surroundings, and they were so directly painted.

We did a lot of cast drawing in school, and that sort of very academic training, but I wasn’t as interested in that as the more painterly stuff, like the Bay Area painters. Diebenkorn. Hopper was a big influence on me. But I guess about Fairfield Porter, I really liked how he seemed to be influenced by de Kooning and so on, that really direct painterly stuff.

Autumn Yellow House Oil 2011 50 ” x 70 ”

LG When you’re painting, what helps you to reach a state of mind where you find yourself doing your best work? How do you get into that zone where you can turn everything else off, and you’re just there with your painting? Is that something you think about?

KS Less distractions, I guess. One thing about going out in the field, that I like, is that you remove yourself from a lot of distractions. In the beginning, I didn’t like it when people came up off the street and talked to me, but now I’ve gotten used to that.

I like the feeling of going out and finding something to paint, and then coming back, almost like a hunter/gatherer or something. You go out, you do the work, and then you come home; as opposed to always being in the same studio. I do a lot more in the studio now. Sort of both. Paint on-site, in the house, and then also work in the studio. I built my own studio when I moved out west in 1988.

KS As far as what makes me concentrate on painting? I don’t know. The thing about working from life… I talk to Scott Noel about this quite a bit. He, like many artists, likes north light. Very constant. And he’ll just work for ten hours straight. But I tend to like more directional light, especially when I’m outside. The light changes in about three hours, so that kind of gives you a framework, as you know, for doing that.

So, setting up the paint and working for several hours, and then the light changes, and so you’re sort of forced to stop. That gives me a time frame where I really concentrate. Then after a few hours, I come out of that state, whatever it is, of concentration.

LG Of course concentration is critical but another aspect of this you may have experienced, is when there’s other people around me, I become aware of unconsciously playing to an audience rather than to myself. It’s like I catch myself anticipating, What is the viewer going to like? Having a people-pleasing mentality while painting is disagreeable. It usually runs contrary to what the painting really needs. Do you find that?

KS Yes, absolutely, because you’re less self-conscious. And I also think that when I’m working on a painting, that it can go through a state where I’ve destroyed it. I’m going to completely change it. I think this is the worst painting I’ve ever done, maybe after hour one. And then it gets to point where hopefully it’s a lot better than where I started it.

But if you have someone watching you do it, I’m a lot less likely, I think, to go to that place where, Okay, this painting is really bad and then I just completely change it.

Red Centerboard, Oil 2011 50″ x 70″

Vaughn Morning, Oil 2010 50″ x 70″

Sunset State 4, Oil 2012 8″ x 10″

LG Tell us something about color in your work. Some of your work uses a higher chroma palette with strong contrast of light and dark and others use a muted, close value with soft atmospheric edges. Is this mainly due to weather conditions and what you are seeing or are there other concerns going on. You often evoke other painters – like Fairfield Porter and Hopper on one hand and Whistler and Monet on the other.

KS Well, the seasons are so extremely different out here in the Northwest. We have so much fog and mist and gray weather in the winter, and then the summers are like Fairfield Porter, like New England clarity. So, just for that reason, the paintings are very different generally. Unless the sun comes out in the winter, we have a very low horizontal light, which is beautiful. But I was just talking about how I work outdoors in snow and rain and stuff. I try to make an abstract, minimalist… There is a kind of abstract, minimalist beauty to the Northwest landscape, and I try to capture that.

LG It was just such a difference in your whole sensibility between the winter and the summer. I guess that makes sense that that’s how you would view it, between your winter and your summer paintings. It’s almost like two different painters were…

KS I’ve heard that…

Yellow Boat in a Blue Bay, Oil 2011 34″ x 46″

 

Winter Above Vaughn, Oil 2011 44″ x 60″

LG There is a similarity in the sense of how you’re moving the paint around, it has a real vigorous, gestural quality to both your winter and summer paintings, even the ones where there’s sort of a higher degree of resolve. But the color was interesting in your summer ones. You seem like in your more recent work—I’m not sure—where your color is evolving more, or it’s changing. Can you speak more about your color?

KS I guess I’m not aware… People say they’re very colorful. I don’t always think that they’re that colorful. There is a lot of saturated color, and I’m always trying to keep the color pretty keyed up, but still have them work as representational paintings. I don’t know. I don’t think that artists always realize how their color sensibility or their way of seeing is so different, but each person has their way of seeing and it’s just kind of an individual thing.

Study for Looking Towards Minter 2, Oil 2010 11″ x 20″

The Davis House In Snow, oil 2009 46″ x 120″ Diptych

LG You often paint large canvases outdoors, what is the appeal for you – putting up with the obstacles of wind, etc. With some of your larger paintings you don’t seem to use an easel and use a very large palette, can you speak about how you go about making one of your larger paintings? I’m curious about your working method.

KS Well, I liked working large scale from the very beginning, relatively large scale outdoors; because as I mentioned, Willis Redfield. I just like the physical thing about working large. And I tried making my own easels to set up outdoors, and they would blow away in the wind. So, as with frame making, also, the simpler, the better. I eventually just found the simplest thing to do is take a piece of 1×2 and attach it to the crossbar on the back of the painting with a little hinge, like a little door hinge, and just wire or tape the bottom part of that to the support.
So then when I go outside (or if I’m even inside) I have a little tripod. I just set the little 1×2 to prop up the painting, and then I set a big piece of plywood as the palette right on the ground. I squat there, and stand up, and sit down, and paint with the paint sitting right on the ground because it’s simpler. I can just pick the painting up when I’m done (there’s no easel) and put it in the truck or take it up to the studio. Carry it on my arm.

Similarly, the palette I like to be big, because I’m trying to mix all these variations in that three-hour period, and I don’t premix colors, so it just gives me more space to work with. I paint outside in the rain and snow a lot, and experiment. I used to put up little lean-tos, kind of like tarps. That became too much work to set those up. I’ve even found that letting the snow and rain land on the oil paint does something which… I’ve done these, I guess you’d call them experiments with mixing oil and water. Really unusual textures and things you wouldn’t be able to reproduce. They’re very unexpected. It’s kind of beautiful in a way.

The Green House 2010 Oil 28″ x 34″

Snow on 7th St., Oil 2011 26″ x 36″

LG Now, you keep coming back to some of the same subjects. Over the course of several years, I’ve noticed that you see the same houses, the same views from your yard, I would imagine. Like of the boat, the yellow boat, and the dock…

KS That boat, in particular; that’s a boat that my grandfather bought in 1936 here in Tacoma, and he rode it back to his house. We’ve had it ever since. I just started painting it when I would come out here to visit. It had this Cadmium yellow color which was great in the landscape out there, this blue and green landscape. I don’t know. It’s sort of a symbolic thing. It’s part of my family history. It becomes a part of these semi-narrative paintings. I don’t try to make narratives. It’s more like I’ll see something and want to paint that scene.

LG The houses that you see. There’s a green house and a yellow house that you’ve painted. I imagine they’re all fairly close by. Do you see them fairly regularly?

KS Yeah, we live on a peninsula, and there are some older homes around here. I’ve driven around. I’m always looking for another thing to paint, so there are these old homes that I like to paint in the landscape. You know how Edward Hopper said at one point. He said, “I’ve painted every picture there is to paint here on the cape…”  I feel that way, sometimes, until I find the next idea. But there’s this white house with a big porch that I’ve painted many times from different angles.

Sunrise Over Water, Oil 2011 30 ” x 40 ”

Morning Sunlight, Oil 2011 48″ x 116″ diptych

KS I recently started doing this diptych, really big paintings, like ten-feet long, in two parts. I started those as one canvas, for instance looking up at that white house from the beach, and then I realized I wanted to also show the beach in the distance off to the left.
Antonio López Garcia. You know that painting of a sink where he’s looking down, and then it’s in two parts?

LG Yes, I do know that one. It’s in the Boston MFA.

KS And he said, “Well, you know, you look down and then you look up.” It’s two different angles. And that’s how I felt about this. When you’re there, you think, Well, I see all this expanse, but actually, you have to turn your head to see the whole thing, and it’s really two views. The first landscape I ever painted in Lou Sloan’s class, he came over and said, “Well, you’re painting from all the way on the right to all the way on the left. You don’t really see that much.” So I learned to focus in on something. But with these paintings, I’m trying to just show the whole thing. Having it in two separate paintings that fit together makes sense.

LG So you’re not into showing the sort of distortion that you would get, the perspective that you often see in some people who do that, like Rackstraw Downes…

KS Yeah, like Rackstraw Downes…

LG …and other people who are following on a similar vein.

KS Well, he’s a master. He’s a great artist. He came to speak at the school, and I know how he works. He does these fantastic drawings, and everything’s from life. And he does have this interesting way of bending the perspective. But no, I don’t work like that. By putting these two paintings together, it’s also a practical means. How do I carry around a ten-foot painting? So, also having it in two pieces made sense.

LGWhat do you think is the difference between West Coast landscape painting and East Coast landscape painting? We had started talking about that a little bit before. I’m curious, since you’ve been on both coasts, now, if you have any thoughts about that?

KS Well, the West Coast painters that I liked early on were the Bay Area painters. Diebenkorn, when he did the figurative work. I like all his paintings. But those painters that were working in San Francisco had these big shapes.

There are so many East Coast painters, I don’t know. How do you encompass all that? But I think that I am sort of a hybrid between East and West Coast, because I grew up in Philadelphia and went to the Academy. The Thomas Aikens tradition. It was influenced by Fairfield Porter. But then I spent a lot of my life out here on the West Coast. It’s a different kind of light and somewhat different influences.

After I moved out here, and I started being influenced by the atmosphere, Morris Graves is somebody I mentioned. And Whistler is another one, his nocturnes and so forth. Trying to get ahold of this Northwest winter landscape… I feel like I absorbed a lot of that East Coast/Philadelphia realism from going to school there. Wherever you go to school (and who your teachers are) is going to influence you a lot. And then moving out here, I have that influence on me, too.

I think these different areas of the country have developed in certain ways. I was in Santa Fe, recently, and I learned more about the history of that area and how artists came there to work. And Los Angeles has its own really interesting history. Seattle has its own particular history of certain artists moving there from other places and germinating.

I just think there are really good artists working everywhere in America. They may not show in the same city where they’re living. And I just think that there’s a lot going on everywhere. But New York is still where a lot of people go to bring their work, but I don’t know.

LG Now, what’s the art scene in Seattle like? Is that supportive to landscape painters? People working from observation?

KS Somewhat more than it used to be. When I first moved here in 1987, there was even less of that. It’s definitely not in the mainstream. Seattle has kind of a funky aesthetic. You know, each city has its own solar system of artists. You find this if you’ve shown in different cities and lived in different places. There are certain people who are very well-known.

In the Northwest, there’s Morris Graves [and] that school of painting. I really like [Morris Graves' work] a lot. But there wasn’t very much of realist painting. I met Gary Fagan and his wife Pamela. They were starting up a little school back then, basically out of their kitchen. It’s now grown into the Gage School. It was first called the Academy of Realist Art, and then the Seattle Academy of Art. She’s from Canada. They lived in New York for a while. I think they went to the Art Students League. They started up this school and started bringing in artists from around the world to teach there, and have really built it into something where this is a community of representational painters.

The history of art in Seattle is interesting. There’s Davidson Gallery, which shows realist work. The owner’s family had a collection of prints. He’s a print dealer, but he also represents a lot of realist artists.

When I came here, the galleries that really interested me were Greg Kucera, who does sort of avant-garde stuff. He doesn’t really show any representational type work. And then  (Don) Foster/White Gallery, which showed Morris Graves and Dale Chihuly. And he didn’t really show [any] figurative work, to speak of, but I wanted to be with that gallery just because it was such a good gallery, and I like Morris Graves’ work. So, I approached them. They didn’t know who I was, and it was sort of a long process of them getting to know me.

In the meantime, I started showing in Santa Monica, because I had been approaching Tatistcheff & Co in New York for years. You know, Peter Tatistcheff .

LG Sure. I know the gallery. They’re no longer in existence.

KS No longer in existence, but he was one of the dealers who would talk to art students off the street. So, going back to art school… In Philadelphia we’d go take the train up to New York, and he was someone we could talk to. He would give us some hope that maybe we could show there.

So, Terry Rogers was working at Peter’s gallery in New York at that time, and then he moved back home to Los Angeles and started his own branch of Tatistcheff . So, he knew my work. He got in contact with me and said, “You know, I like your work.” There was someone who was interested in me. So, I started showing in Santa Monica. Every time I had a show there, I’d send the card to Don Foster in Seattle. And then they eventually called me up and said, “Hey, would you like to be in a group show?” So, that’s how that happened. In sort of a roundabout way.

So getting back to your question about Seattle’s art scene. I had to find my way into that, but in the meantime, show in a different city. So, I think you just have to find the right venue that’s interested in your work

After a Snow Fall Oil 2012 38 ” x 48 ”

LG John Thorton, in one of his videos about you, talks about the difficulty of painters succeeding in the artworld, he quotes the New Yorker article where it talks about: “radiating a half-life of blighted ambitions” (The New Yorker, The Art World, Looking for the Zeitgeist Dec 6 1982 by Calvin Tomkins)
(here is the full quote from this 1982 article…)

“Precious few ever become rich or famous, needless to say, but more and more of them are trying. In its current “Guide to Galleries, Museums, Artists,” the magazine Art in America lists some fourteen thousand artists in this country, each with his or her gallery affiliation. Assuming that for every artist who has a gallery there are at least twenty who want one, it appears that the profession is getting a little crowded. What are we going to do with all these artists, with all this art? Teaching jobs in the fine arts are even harder to come by these days than gallery affiliations. Works of art must be piling up throughout the republic in dangerous profusion, unsold and unseen, radiating a half-life of blighted ambitions.”

30 years later, the over-population of painters today barely leaves room to breathe sometimes. That combined with many galleries closing due to the economy and even that painting itself increasingly becoming irrelevant to the NYC-based artworld, painters have what seems to be an impossible struggle ahead.

KS Yeah, you mentioned about this quotation about unsold artworks radiating a half-life of blighted ambition, and we joked about that when we were art students living in the same house in North Philadelphia. We had a great landlord. We lived in this beautiful, old home in kind of a rundown neighborhood about ten blocks north of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on Mt. Vernon Street. That’s where Thomas Eakins used to live, right on that street. And Daniel Garber, also in that neighborhood. It was a beautiful old home with tall ceilings and all sorts of beautiful moldings and everything, and there were five of us at a time living in there.

So, we had this little community of artists. You know, when you get out of school and you start working on your own, it may be harder to keep in touch with other artists. So, as you said about teaching, if you’re in an academic environment, you have that connection. I haven’t done as much teaching, so I am kind of isolated, in a way. I live out in the country, but I do keep in touch with artists that I’ve known since way back in art school.

LG That is a good suggestion to not limit yourself to only trying to show in a gallery where you live. There is so much competition amongst painters now, that it seems like, in my mind anyway (it’s perhaps different for you) but there’s almost no point to competing anymore. The market is just so saturated with a very high painter to buyer ratio, that to my mind, it’s just better to have it all just be a labor of love and just to have the integrity… and to let go of notions of “making it big someday”. You’re probably not going to get ahead anyway. You might as well just do what you want.

KS Yeah, absolutely. It has to be about the work, and there’s no reason to be doing it if you don’t really like what you’re doing.

The Cherry Tree 1999 Oil 50″ x 70″

KS My personal story briefly is that while I agree with everything you just said; if I can get a good gallery relationship, and keep that healthy, and have a place to show the work, and sell some of it, and have some kind of following, and just be paying attention to the work I’m doing, and be happy with that, that’s all I could want.

When I was an art student (I had just started in art school) my grandfather said to me, “You should have some other skill or trade.” It’s practical. As it turned out, they were restoring the sculpture collection at the Pennsylvania Academy Museum. I was hired by Virginia Naude, an art conservator, as a lab assistant to help her restore all the sculptures in the museum collection.

Through that I was introduced to another conservator. And so, all these years I’ve been doing sculpture conservation. I get to travel and see collections, fantastic art collections. I walk into a room, or in someone’s house, or in a museum, and I see these works; and I get to work on these fantastic pieces of art I never would even see.

And so, I have that outlook on the art world, and I see the art world on the level of the top tier galleries, anyone you could name, and I realize I’m not in that world, and I never will be, but that’s fine. I show in the best galleries that I can make a connection with, and some of them have been pretty good. But I realize I have my place, and I have my friends, like we were talking about. I met George Nick and Scott Noel. I’m meeting you.

I’m just happy if I can be doing paintings I think are good and getting better. Then that’s all I really want. It’s important to sell some of the work. I really try hard to keep a good gallery relationship. And that’s a whole other thing I really feel strongly about, that artists should realize that keeping that relationship strong is really important in terms of bringing people to the gallery, and everything being transparent, as much as possible.

LG You work with the George Billis gallery? Is that your main gallery? …

KS Yes, it is right now. Yes. I had been showing at the Tatistcheff, the first show I got in New York. It was on 57th Street and everything was nice, but that went bad. He had financial problems. And it took me a long time to get another gallery. So I met George, He’s a pretty young guy. I just met him. I was there one day with Scott Noel, just looking at galleries and just struck up a conversation. That eventually led to being in a group show and then having a show. And it’s really tough if you lose a gallery to get another one. So, I think it’s really important for anyone to appreciate, if you can get one, just to keep that relationship healthy.

LG Right. Especially with the economy the way it is. A number of very big galleries have gone under. And so, all the ones who were in good galleries that have closed are now moving into the other ones, and making it even more impossible.

I think you had asked me one of these questions about how do you make it [and] survive in the art world. And my answer to that would be try to keep expenses low, the overhead low. Certainly in the beginning. And building a studio was one of things I wanted to do to…

Alex Kanevsky J.F.H. 48″ x 48″, oil on board, 2011
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Many readers are familiar with Alex Kanevsky’s work but perhaps not all of his details. The internet offers a great deal of information about Mr. Kanevsky but unfortunately much of it is, if not false, not exactly accurate either. I was recently fortunate enough to visit Mr. Kavnevsky in his studio and I got the sense from him that this situation didn’t bother him, and that perhaps he even found it amusing.

I asked him about being from Lithuania and his studies there. I had assumed he was an ethnic Russian who grew up in Lithuania or was from near Kalingrad or something to that effect (This will probably only add to the general confusion about his background). He quickly corrected me and explained that he was from the provinces in Russia and studied in Lithuania. He then told a story about an article that had been written about him in France recently. The article seemed to only have one fact that was correct. Mr. Kanevsky seemed resigned to the errors. He said that he felt that these facts about him end up being similar to his drawings. The information isn’t always correct but when you put everything together it tells a sort of truth.

The details that I know to be true are the following: Alex Kanevsky is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania based painter who teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He shows at J. Cacciola Gallery and Dolby Chadwick Gallery, and had a show in December at J. Cacciola Gallery. He will also have a show in Milan, Italy at the Barbara Frigerio Gallery in November of this year.

I want to thank Mr. Kanevsky very much for opening his studio to me and being willing to take the time to answer my questions.

Neil Plotkin: You grew up in Russia and have lived as an adult in the US; you studied art in both Lithuania and Philadelphia in – by your own description – quite different educational environments: do you feel that you are more tied to the traditions and lineages of Philadelphia than Russia/Lithuania/Europe?

Alex Kanevsky: I was fortunate to depart Lithuania and to arrive to the US at the time when I was already well familiar with the European /Eastern European traditions and somewhat educated in that direction, but not convinced yet that I wanted to go in that direction myself. So in the US, I found myself with one foot in each tradition, both feet not too firmly planted. Having been deprived in this way of strong authority figures, I mostly had to fill the vacuum with my own inventions. As the result, I don’t feel strongly tied to either tradition and certainly do not feel myself to be a part of any lineage. It is a rather confusing mix of influences that I never tried to sort out.

Kitchen Landscape 48″ x 24″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: You studied math previous to studying art. In many ways the two are very related. In practice have these two aspects of your education intertwined in any way?

AK: Mathematics for me is related to art in many ways. Most importantly, it is because much of what it deals with cannot be expressed or even approximately described in words. Getting used to being comfortable in that situation is a good training for an artist. I understand this situation as being more liberating than limiting. That led to an additional, unintended conclusion that artists statements are not possible and any attempts to write one lead to confusion and misinformation.

R.W. 24″ x 24″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: As we discussed previously, it seems that your work underwent a rapid evolution about 10 years ago, becoming more fluid and comfortable. Can you talk about that transition and how your thinking changed at that time?

AK: A little more than 10 years ago I won a Pew Grant that allowed me to do nothing but paint for almost two years. Doing that, I discovered continuity. Being able to come back in the morning to the painting I left last night, the memory of the work still fresh, and the sense of flow uninterrupted. It made a big difference to me, probably because I am not a fast painter, so I can never start and finish anything in one day. Usually, the paintings stay with me for weeks or months. The continuity was addictive. It gave me the taste of my personal right modus operandi. When the grant money run out, I realized that I was now committed to this kind of life and would rather be very poor, but paint every day than return to the part-time world. For a while that is what I did, and later the paintings began to sell in the galleries, so I was able to go to my studio and paint every day ever since. That was my personal mini-revolution: the understanding of how I need to function as an artist and the commitment to do just that regardless of the circumstances.

J.F.H. with Four Doors, 36” x 58”, oil on wood, 2011

NP: Can you describe the perfect studio for you?

AK: The perfect studio is not very important. I think one should not become too attached to buildings and geographical locations even if one works happily there. It is a good idea to move from time to time to shake up the old paradigm. Some things are important to a painter: good constant, natural sunlight. Enough space to walk away from paintings. Otherwise I am more clear on what I don’t want: big multi-studio buildings full of various artists.

Blue Room with Running Dog, 55” x 77”, oil on wood, 2011

NP: You teach at PAFA one day a week. You have said that one day a week is the ideal amount of teaching, what does it bring to you/your artistic practice?

AK: It keeps me honest and on my toes. We deal with the same painting issues in this class that I face myself every day in my studio. The class forces me to verbalize these issues and find the ways to express them and the solutions clearly. I would not be naturally inclined to do that if it were not for the students. It is clearly an adversarial situation both for them and (less evidently) for me. At the end we all benefit from more clarity.

Morning Television 8.5″ x 16″, oil on wood

NP: You’re considered by many artists and critics to be extremely at ease in your drawing and painting skills. But you often talk about how difficult you find painting. What are you struggling with right now?

AK: Well, it is the road with no end. As your skills inevitably get better with time, you expect more from yourself. Skills in themselves, beyond certain serviceable level, don’t matter very much, but I always want to function at the limit of my current abilities to keep things exciting. There should always be danger of painting crushing and burning. I want painting to be difficult so that there is always room for failure. Working this way has an unintended consequence of improving the skills.
The struggle then has nothing to do with the technical difficulties and the level of skills. The struggle is mostly to find clarity.

Annunciation 66 x 66, oil on linen, 2007

Chelsea Hotel Landscape?48″ x 48″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: Titles can change work entirely and in the title of paintings like The Annunciation and Chelsea Hotel Landscape or the titles of bodies of work, like Proserpine, Heroes and Animals, Parlor Games etc, it seems that there could be a narrative to the work. Does narration play a role in your work and if so, what role does the narrative play in development of the work?

AK: There are no linear narratives in this work, despite of what the titles might suggest. There are absurd pseudo-narratives in the paintings that you mentioned. They are used as working tools: mostly to accomplish certain precise emotional climate rather than to tell a story. If you think of stories or memories from your own life, they are important to you as triggers that allow you to relive the meaning of the events, to recapture your own emotional response to them. I use, combine and fracture these “narratives” for the same reason. It is more interesting to trigger than to describe. I don’t mind it if these titles or the implied stories mislead a viewer to some extent. To make a painting her/his own, a viewer will have to accept the ambiguity, confusion and search for clarity that were the conditions of its arrival.

Large Nude with Several Pictures of Herself 35.75″ x 59.5″, oil on wood, 2011

NP: In your Progress Sequence, you’ve described your process of painting as being a bit like “wandering in the dark with uncertain goals. Not aimless, but not exactly purposeful.” If that’s the case, how do you decide that a painting is finished?

AK: When I am happy with it. When all the potential improvements will only do harm. When any roughness and awkwardness left in it ceases being a shortcoming and becomes a vital part of composition.

Or it is irretrievably lost (finished in a different way).

Paintings do let us know when to leave them alone. Artists often overlook these signals, being so focused on imposing their will. I don’t think of painting as something I do to a canvas. To me it is a complicated relationship of equals. A form of conflict. When we reach some sort of agreement that makes everyone satisfied it is the good time to leave it alone.

C.M. 2011

NP: As drawing can be so different from painting, do you feel that you have different mentors in drawing than in painting?

AK: There were different artists I looked at. Drawing is very specific, very abstracted form of communication. Drawing is to painting what a game of bridge is to life, to use a somewhat convoluted analogy. Anyway, I looked at Balthus, Raphael, Giacometti, Auerbach, Andy Wyeth, Antonio Lopez, Seurat, Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombley, Adolph Menzel, Euan Uglow for drawings – among many others.

Road to Todi 2011

NP: When I visited your studio, you mentioned that you had started to draw again a couple of years ago. I understood this to mean that it had been several years since you drew on a regular basis. I’m wondering what your reasons were to get back to drawing.

AK: Curiosity. To see what’s there. They fascinate me now. Looking at a good drawing is like talking to a completely insane person, who nevertheless says some beautiful and profound things. Naturally I wanted to try that myself.

And seeing Lopez Garcia show in Boston and Michael Rossman’s here in Philadelphia and Sangram Majumdar in NY.

L.D.V3, 2011

L.D.V.4

NP: When we talked, you explained that when you draw your models, after breaks you ask them to get back into position but don’t require that they get back into the exact position. Could you describe this process and how you came about this approach?

AK: After not drawing for a good 15 years (why draw when you can paint?), I wanted to try again fresh. A model came to the studio and we attempted a pencil drawing on the back of some big old watercolor that was around. I was out of practice in trying to express volumes with lines. In fact it seemed like a rather bizarre idea. Things were pretty rough for a while. I couldn’t find one shoulder, and since I did not have an eraser in the studio, I had to re-draw it over and over. Eventually, it was in the right place, along with the collection of the wrong lines surrounding the good one. Later, as I looked at it, I realized that the search for the right line that went on, or rather the agglomeration of the wrong lines, implying the existence of the right line somewhere among them, was the most interesting thing about that drawing. It connected the drawing in my mind with my own commutative wave paintings that I did in Ireland a little earlier. It also reminded me of someone’s project I have seen once. The artist photographically superimposed 10 years of the Playboy centerfolds, and the resulting image surprisingly looked like a beautiful abstract Titian painting of a flesh cloud.

Now, that I have been drawing every week for a couple of years, I have become better at it, I don’t make enough mistakes.

So, in order to give myself some space to fail, I ask the models not to be too precise in keeping the pose, or sometimes even to move intentionally. These are implied rather than realized drawings.

K.B. 1, aquatint

J.F.H., aquatint

NP: Your drawing work is completely linear whereas the painting is done in broad color swaths and your prints are done in thin layers piled up. Can you talk about how the different approaches in each medium influence the other media?

AK: I am not sure they do. In my mind they all exist independently. That is their attraction for me. I use every one of these media the only way that seems right to me. For example, if I want to work tonally, why would I draw? Painting seems more natural for that. And the printmaking is actually collaboration with Erika Greenberg Schneider. My part of it resembles watercolor mere than anything else. I don’t have anything to do with the actual printmaking.

Diego with his knives 2010

Polish Rider 28″ x 48″, oil on board

NP: When I look at some of your drawings and Spinning Figure, in particular, I am reminded of Tony Cragg’s sculptures. One of the first paintings of a horse in recent years was named The Polish Rider – I am assuming that this is a reference to the Rembrandt in the Frick Collection. And of course there’s the painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Are you creating work with the idea of a dialogue with other artists and artworks?

AK: I do. The connection with Tony Craig sculpture never occurred to me, but you are probably right about that. I feel connected to what so many other artists did. We are not in vacuum. The dialog really exists. I don’t think it is some sort of linear progression that art historians are so fond of. It is more like a complex fascinating conversation with many people, dead and alive spanning several hundreds of years. It is a wonderful feeling to be able to talk with Rembrandt, and there is no other way to do that for me.

T.S., 2012

L.H. 2012

L.G. 2

More interviews with Alex Kanevsky:

http://www.vivianite.net/alex-kanevsky
http://rtspot.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/alex-kanevsky/

click here for a larger view

Interview with Sydney Licht
by Neil Plotkin

Sydney Licht is a painter based in New York. Ms. Licht studied at Smith College and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and is also a member of the still life group Zeuxis.

This past summer, Ms Licht had a solo show at Kathryn Markel and was included in two group shows which opened in December, the Small Packages show at Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, TN and The Common Object at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She will be included in the upcoming Zeuxis show Reflections, which opens at Linwood University in Missouri in February 2012.

There is also a video interview with Sydney Licht in her studio at the end of this interview.

I would like to thank Sydney very much for her time for this interview.

Neil Plotkin The classic artist story, the one here in America, is very often that a young artist moves to New York, struggles, builds a career and then moves and sets up life elsewhere. And you’ve done the exact opposite. You’ve built a career. You’ve lived around the country. You’ve raised your children. Once that was done, you moved to New York. How do you think this has benefitted you as an artist and how does living in New York now help you as an artist?

Sydney Licht I went to a liberal arts college on the East Coast as an undergraduate. The great benefit of not staying on the East Coast for grad school was that I was exposed to a different perspective at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is where I went to grad school for painting. Living in Chicago was a revelation, permitting me to move past the European canon of art history.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the Art Institute of Chicago or the school there, but the professors I studied with were so open to influences outside of the European painting tradition (which I had, had a lot of as an undergraduate). I was exposed to the Field Museum of Natural History, Outsider art, Chicago Imagist paintings and art inspired by popular culture, comic books, etc.

It was eye-opening and I realized that I didn’t have to follow all those “rules” I was given as an undergrad. I could do any kind of painting I wanted. I could define my interests in a very personal way. Having this opportunity in Chicago and not going to New York right away right away helped to shape me as an artist.

Still Life with Artificial Sweetners, 12 in. x 12 in, oil on board, 2010

NP: In the past, you told me you started out as an abstract painter. Can you talk about your transition from being an abstract painter to a representational painter?

SL: In Chicago, both while I was in grad school and after, I was painting large, neo-Expressionist, autobiographical paintings. The paintings weren’t completely abstract, however, with some evidence of imagery apparent. I called them ‘organic abstractions’. Each painting took a very long time. I was interested in the materiality of paint, and the painting process involved much scraping off and putting on; finishing a painting became so unending. I came to realize that the paintings weren’t getting resolved because I was using color arbitrarily.

To resolve this, I gave myself a problem and therefore, some structure. I decided to translate the formal aspects of one of my organic abstractions into a still life painting. The painting I first chose to translate had a huge slab of white paint cutting through a dark form, splitting it in two. To mimic that relationship in a still life, I placed two objects next to each other, touching in such a way that an interesting negative shape in between them was created.

To understand color more fully, I restricted myself to a very limited palette, using only four or five colors. I think the colors were yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, ivory black and white, essentially the primary colors plus white and black.

After this first still life, I made at least ten more in the same vein. I was reinvigorated by what I could do with such minimal means. Because I was learning so much about color harmonies with respect to value and hue, I kept working with this limited palette for at least five years.

Still Life with Espresso Bag #1, 24 in. x 16 in., oil on linen, 2008

NP: Some of your colors are very keyed. Have you changed your palette a lot? How are they keyed? What kinds of colors? The yellows are very vibrant. The oranges are very vibrant.

SL: Not that much, although now, I think more about the warm and cool aspects of primary colors. I stopped using black many years ago. Usually a painting idea starts with a question. When I first started the still life project, it was, Can I make a still life that mimics the abstract ideas that I’m interested in? Or can I understand color better by using very little of it? As the questions have changed, the palette has changed.

At one point I asked myself, “Can I make a monochromatic still life with just slightly tinted hues of white?” Right after that, I really wanted to see how far I could go in pushing color intensity so the palette expanded to include a fluorescent yellow.

Still Life with Dessert, 30 in. x 30 in., oil on linen, 2011

NP: So you’re just using alizarin, ultramarine, yellow ochre and then you’ll add only one or two colors. You have a very tight palette then?

SL: I still use yellow ochre to which I’ve added lemon yellow. I use alizarin crimson which is a cool red and to that, I’ve added cadmium red light, which is warmer….so a cool and a warm of the same primary color dynamic are usually what’s on the palette. I’ve replaced ultramarine with cobalt blue and added manganese blue.

NP: Recently you completed a residency at Yaddo. Can you talk about the experience that you had there and how the work emerged from it?

SL: Even before I got to Yaddo, I knew I wanted to create a visual diary of the experience.

When I arrived, the first thing that the staff presented me with was a white paper bag with my name on it. It was my lunch to take to the studio. Receiving this white bag with my name on it was a very welcoming thing, like a gift.

I took the bag with my lunch in it to my studio which was completely empty and white and beautiful. A gorgeous space with nothing in it. When I took the sandwich out of the bag, it was the only visual thing in the whole room, and so I decided to paint it. I had such a good time painting it.

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

On the second day and for the the rest of my three week stay, every morning I would pick up my lunch pail at breakfast and go to the studio. My visual diary became this ritual of painting my lunch before eating it. I would spend the morning getting warmed up by doing a watercolor of what I was given for lunch. I’d eat the lunch. Then in the afternoons, I worked on still life paintings in oil.

It was a wonderful experience. During working hours at Yaddo, everyone is expected to remain quiet in public areas so as not to disturb the other residents. All residents meet for dinner and then you can either go back to work or socialize. I found it to be very productive.

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

NP: From my perspective, you’re a very established artist. You know what you’re doing. You’ve been doing it for a long time. You know how you’re going to approach things. How do you feel this residency helped move you forward? How did you benefit from it?

SL: Even though I’ve been painting for a long time, there are continual interruptions in my daily life not having to do with painting. Fighting to minimize those interruptions is a constant battle for me. When I go to a residency like Yaddo, I don’t have to think about what I’m going to make for dinner and all the other practical aspects of living my life. I’m on a mental holiday which makes room for true and consistent focus. Finding moments of focus is rare in my daily life, and easier to achieve at a residency. Also, I met some great people at Yaddo. Besides visual artists, some terrific writers, composers and performance artists were in residence while I was there.

[A group of images from this series]

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

Yaddo Lunches – 6 in x 6 in – watercolor

NP: For your 2008 show, you received a favorable review in the New Yorker and the reviewer commented that Morandi was a touchstone of your work and that he looms large in your work. Anybody who is a still life painter or any kind of painter would be very happy to hear that. Rather than letting a reviewer determine your sources of inspiration, I wanted to hear where you feel that you fall in the tradition of still life painting or painting in general?

SL: I don’t think about that question a lot. I think more about where I sit in the world and about trying to incorporate the life that I live into the work, while still making the work—I hate to use the word universal but—accessible to all who are drawn to the visual. Incorporating both in each painting is a goal that I strive for. Being of my time, but also recognizing that I am a product of history as well, especially art history.

Still Life with Coffee and Tea, 16 in. x 12 in., oil on board, 2010

NP: Your work has a lot of colors poking through the surface layer of paint. Within each block of color there’s a shimmer of what’s underneath. For example, in Still Life with Coffee and Tea, you see what’s underneath a little bit. What’s your process regarding those previous layers? Are these color revisions or are they a part of how you create the blocks of color? How do you do this?

SL: Well, with each painting it’s a different story, like a different puzzle to solve. What shows through from underneath is the result of the process of finding the right hue and value relationships as a natural part of making the painting work. It’s not premeditated. I don’t paint on a colored ground. I start a painting with a palette knife, and that enables me to not get bogged down in details too quickly. At the beginning of each painting, these color/value approximations are just that…first attempts that are refined as the painting progresses through thoughtful readjustments.

Still Life with Open Box #1, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on linen, 2006

NP: It seems that negative space has always been an important part of your composition. Is that how you approach work?

SL: I realized when I first started the still life project that the negative spaces around the objects was the real subject matter; meaning can be found in how the space around the forms impacts those forms. You’re right, that composition is the first thing I think about, and finding a compelling negative shape or space inspires me to do the painting in the first place.

Still Life with Sweet and Low #1, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on linen, 2010

NP: The paintings are so well composed; for example to say there are four millimeters on the side of the canvas. I’m looking at Still Life with Sweet and Low. Are you looking at a viewfinder to capture that or do you draw it in?

SL: I don’t use a viewfinder. I do make a very minimal sketch; just a line drawing of how the objects relate to the edges of the picture plane and how things are relating to one another. Sometimes I’m happy with the first sketch, but often I have to do several versions of an idea to arrive at a successful arrangement of elements.

NP: On the canvas or in a painting?

SL: No, I use a sketchbook. Once I think I’ve got something, I will mix up several piles of color on the palette and go at the canvas with big slabs of paint using the knife. I rarely sketch it out on the canvas first. I learned a long time ago if I make a very detailed drawing ahead of the painting; that I’ve already answered my question and in so doing, I lose interest in the painting. Maintaining the excitement in solving a problem is key for me to stay engaged. I have restricted my drawing over the years to remain curious and surprised by each new work I make.

NP: What is the discovery that you’re looking for?

SL: Something I didn’t know before. Absolutely. The best kind of resolution is when the unexpected happens at the end of the painting process and I learn something new. If I have an initial idea and it works that’s great. At other times, I think an idea will work and it doesn’t. When that happens, I have to push myself by asking, “What is it that I’m really interested in here?”

Hard questions come up in the middle of painting. Through desperate acts, I am pushed into finding new solutions. That can mean painting out an object I first thought was crucial to the work. Or, the desperate act can be suddenly adding a piece of color at the edge to make a statement. The painting talks back and points out what I had not considered before.

NP: You’re talking about when things aren’t working. In desperation, do you abandon canvasses or do you keep beating it until it works?

SL: I keep making changes. I don’t give up on paintings, no. I mean, sometimes they’ve taken 8 or 9 years to complete but I rarely abandon a painting.

NP: You’re a member of Zeuxis, a still life group of painters. Has the exposure to other still life painters benefited you much or influenced you in any way?

SL: It has. Often, the themes of the exhibitions have pushed me in directions I probably wouldn’t have gone and forced me to look at things I may not have considered otherwise.

The Common Object exhibition currently at the Maryland Institute College of Art is a good example of that. We were all given a dishcloth that we had to include somehow, in a painting. I probably wouldn’t have placed a dishcloth in a painting without that impetus, but because I had to, it brought me back to thinking about what it means to fold and arrange cloth. This led to the paintings of tied up bundles of cloth.

Still Life with Two Bundles, 8 in. x 8 in., oil on linen, 2010

In the Common Object painting, I kept the dishcloth relatively contained so that the original folds were still in evidence. That made me relate these folded pieces of cloth to the boxes I’ve been painting recently because like the boxes, these bundles are like beautifully wrapped gifts.

Still Life with Bundles, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on linen, 2011

NP: You keep talking about gifts and these small things. When I look at Still Life with Bundles, I think of the Japanese tradition of gifts being very well packaged. They’re small and compact. It’s all very considered. Is that something that you think about? The Asian approach or the Japanese approach in particular?

SL: No, but that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about a Japanese influence before. I am attracted to non-Western approaches to making two-dimensional works though. I love Indian miniature paintings because of the emphasis placed on shape and pattern, flatness and color, but I hadn’t considered the Japanese approach you’re referring to. Maybe I will now.

Containers, in general, fascinate me because they bring up issues surrounding consumption. Tabletops have become resting places for fast food containers instead of elaborately prepared meals to enjoy

NP: Why have you chosen the things that you’ve chosen? Why do you use bags and packages as subjects?

SL: I choose things I’m attracted to visually and conceptually. I’ve painted food for a long time because of its association with desirability; especially certain kinds of fruit, for a very personal reason. As a child, I was very allergic to raw fruit and exposure to certain foods produced a very severe allergic reaction. Consequently, I was denied many tastes that I Ioved.

Perhaps because I was faced with this promise of the forbidden at an early age, I associate painting with desire and physicality.

Still Life with Orange and Stem 2, 14 in. x 16 in., oil on linen, 2002

Painting images of boxes and packages is an extension of this. A package has the promise of something delightful inside just as a piece of fruit presents the promise of something delightful to taste.

We live in a culture where we see food packaged up more often than not. These packages can be so visually appealing. There’s one painting image I sent you in which an orange is pictured in front of a plain cardboard box…[Still Life with Orange]…and the shadow thrown on the box by the orange… I really love that box because of the simple way it catches the light. I’ve painted it over and over again. The light will shift on a box or bag depending upon the time of day or what it’s next to. Boxes and bags are great color catchers.

Still Life with Pasta, 12 in. x 12 in., oil on board, 2010

Video interview with interview with Sydney Licht in her studio

Albers, Josef, b. 1888 d. 1976, was one of the most influential artist-educators of the 20th century, was a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany during the 1920s. In 1933 he came to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design and was professor emeritus of art at Yale until his death in 1976. Joseph Albers was a significant contributor and influence on modern painting.

From his wikipedia page…”Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically. Painting usually on Masonite, he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded colors used on the back of his works.”

Albers is perhaps best known today by art students for his famous book and course of study Interaction of Color Originally issued in 1963 as a limited-edition set of commentary and 150 silkscreened colour plates, the book introduced generations of students, artists, designers, and collectors to Albers’ unique approach to complex principles. A smaller version of the Interaction of Color was published later (1975) and has been a mainstay color bible for generations of art students.

The original publication has long been out of print and is extremely expensive if you could find it at all. However the original silkscreened printing likely have the greatest color fidelity. A the January 2010 reissue of Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition [Hardcover] is considered by many reviewers on Amazon to be a gorgeous book. From the publisher’s blurb… “Lavishly produced as a two-volume slipcased set, this book replicates Albers’ revolutionary exercises, explaining concepts such as colour relativity and vibrating and vanishing boundaries through the use of colour, shape, die-cut forms, and movable flaps that illustrate his astonishing demonstrations of the changing and relative nature of colour. Also included for the first time are new studies from the Albers archive, produced by the artist’s students in the early 1960s. A celebration of Albers’ legendary achievements, this beautiful publication is an essential addition to any serious art library.”
in a shameless promotion, I’m linking this book to Amazon where a small percentage of the sale goes to help support this site if you click from this link…
Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition

There is also an interesting new biography,Josef Albers: To Open Eyes you may want to consider.

A very interesting video from one of Albers former students (note he has several more related videos on Albers Color Theory for viewing on Vimeo)

Albers Homage To The Square: An Explanation from Richard (Dick) Nelson on Vimeo

A few excerpts from a long interview with Josef Albers from the Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institute Oral history interview in 1968
Complete interview can be read from this Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution link

JOSEF ALBERS:
And why do I paint squares since 1959, in the same design, in the same arrangement; Because I do not see that there is, in any visual articulation, one final solution. In science they think sometimes they have found a solution. Already the next year the whole thing may look upside down, and its not the truth any more. An example I have quoted repeatedly: in 1848 I think it was, (it was at that time when flying was considered an insoluble problem) that was a time when the chemists at an international congress agreed that we are not able to develop an organic compound from inorganic constituents. And in the next year, in 1849, Boettcher was able to develop an organic compound urea, you see. So, in science what seems true today may not be true tomorrow. There science is dealing with physical facts, in art we are dealing with psychic effects. With this I come to my first statement: The source of art – that is, where it comes from – is the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect. That’s what I’m talking about. When I want to speak about why I am doing the same thing now, which is squares, for – how long? – 19 years. Because there is no final solution in any visual formulation. Although this may be just a belief on my part, I have some assurances that that is not the most stupid thing to do, through Cezanne, whom I consider as one of the greatest painters. From Cezanne we have, so the historians tell us – 250 paintings of Mont St. Victoire. But we know that Cezanne has left in the fields often more than he took home because he was disappointed with his work. So we may conclude he did many more than 250 of the same problem. Yes?

SEVIM FESCI: Yes.

JOSEF ALBERS: How see Van Gogh. You know his Sunflowers?

SEVIM FESCI: Yes, of course.

JOSEF ALBERS: He has traced them on tracing paper and then has transferred the tracings on new canvases, precisely the same shape. Every flower and leaf form is repeated precisely. This mad man undertook a method to save time and traced and transferred it on another canvas again and again, and filled out the contours with other colors. So we have multiplied sunflowers – I have photographed them, I have slides on it that prove that he made the same contour of sunflowers in other colors. We have two l’Arlesiennes. Why two? Because he was not satisfied with the first one. He said there is another possibility, you see. And that is what Picasso has said this way, I quote now, “When we are honest we have to admit that we never get what we want.” So I am excused when I make now several hundred squares. Yes? Or when you go downstairs and see – I am now in my red period. I was for years in the yellow period, you know. But now I am with the reds, it was hard for me to get into the reds. Very hard, how I am tickled to death to make more reds. Which one is the best I don’t know. But this is to show why I am promoting serial image. Because like Cezanne has demonstrated it, like Picasso has said it, “We don’t get what we want.” And therefore we continue, and therefore my saying is, “A painter paints because he has no time not to paint.” And I am a teacher because I teach all the time – now you are my victim – I teach and I have no time not to teach. And I’m a little bit disturbed when I have to play retrospective, as I did before. You see that I’ve changed my viewpoint

JOSEF ALBERS: I understand. But, you see, I am more interested to stimulate the creative process. In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness. I have tried to make people aware and ready to recognize – that’s again observation, the word I used before, and in articulation what is then the reaction to it. The creative process as such I have tried to lead back to the most basic attitude, and that is by presenting, and there I feel very instrumental, by presenting to my students material as such without telling them what to do, how to handle it, but ask them to find a new –

SEVIM FESCI: Way of expressing.

JOSEF ALBERS: No, not the word “expression” – I have told you already that’s not –

SEVIM FESCI: Of presenting them?

JOSEF ALBERS: — to find out what it is able to do, by presenting it with a new function. Therefore, I came furthermore to the conclusion just at the end of my formal teaching – I usually say I taught for a hundred years – that all art studies are in the end basic and that at art schools there are no graduate studies. The graduate studies come when they leave the school and are working their whole life and demonstrate that also in other fields. Graduate students don’t want to be led by professors. They want to find their own “nonsense”. So I have come to the conclusion that the graduate art school is an error. And I have experienced that in another way, also, When I was called to Yale Art School here I was expected to teach mainly the older – graduate students. But I made a point that I took first and mostly the beginners because the babies need more education than the grownups. And so the students out of the graduate class came into my basic courses without being asked to do that. Therefore I had such large classes in the basic courses in color and in drawing and later also when I gave basic design again. I’m very rough in the treating of my students. And in saying it now, I have said to my students “I am putting you into a vacuum and ask you to breathe.” But at the school we came to new discoveries, to new formulations, and that, I think, has been followed up more or less everywhere in the world.

JOSEF ALBERS: Well, I would say the aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth. And therefore the last 15-20 years in which everyone tried to be different from everyone else with the result that in their work, they all look alike, there is an artificial and not true relationship because honesty and modesty are forgotten. The more eccentric one behaved the more he was considered a personality. On the other hand, the, more you obey your constitutional inclinations, your constitutional preferences and prejudices, the more you are yourself. You have not to force so-called individuality. You have to avoid everything that makes you a Wagnerian blowing up your gestures, blowing up your verbal formulations. Therefore I recommend simplicity because it is honest against all over-dramatization.

More great information and imagery can be found on the Albers Foundation website

Several members of the Jerusalem Studio School faculty, visiting artists and friends have generously contributed their thoughts and experience with interviews and articles on Painting Perceptions over the past couple of years. The Jerusalem Studio School was founded by Israel Hershberg in 1998 where it not only pioneered figurative art training in Israel but evolved into one of the world’s leading figurative painting and drawing programs.

I mention this now because JSS has been recently been facing serious financial difficulties and is in need of our support (more detailed information about the nature of the financial difficulties at the JSS can be read on David Cohen’s article about this on artcritical.com ) Fortunately, the school has many friends and supporters who are rallying together with a fundraising auction to help the school remain solvent and continue its mission.
Here is the link at the JSS for more information on the benefit.

A benefit auction, with work donated from 26 distinguished painters, will be held this Feb. 21 at the Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in NYC. Contributing artists include such major painters as Lennart Anderson, Gideon Bok, Leonard Dufresne, Philip Pearlstein, Ruth Miller, Sangram Majumdar, Stuart Shils, Ken Kewley and Kyle Staver. Here is a link to view the work being sold at the auction’s preview and presale.

Donations can be made via Donate Sideways

The Jerusalem Studio School was founded by Israel Hershberg in 1998 where it not only pioneered figurative art training in Israel but evolved into one of the world’s leading painting and drawing programs. Their rigorous program gives the student a firm foundation in classical traditions as well as contemporary painting. There are far too few art schools where the emphasis is on perception, the human form and the careful study of the old masters that is not taught in a conservative, academic or atelier-like structure. At the same time the JSS differs significantly from many university and other art schools by their focus on studio practice instead of art theory and conceptual matters. The JSS’s programs of rigorous visual analysis through daily drawing and painting from life and from make for a unique course of study that should be supported by all who wish to further modern yet traditional figurative training of future artists.
see this link for examples of student work from the master class at JSS.

In an earlier interview with Painting Perceptions, Israel Hershberg stated:

“The school was designed to compensate, particularly as Israel is concerned, for the dearth of significant collections needed to generate artistic archetypes in developing art students’ minds, as mentioned. The Master Class, the core component of the School, is an intensive, immersive, incubator-like studio environment that’s designed to prod, through drawing and painting, with due emphasis on perception and the human form on a daily basis, the germination of what can become an unadulterated pictorial intelligence. This roughly comprises the school’s imprimatur of sustained physical contact during the first two years of study. In the third and fourth years this imprimatur is phased into ambitious pictorial research based on copying, transcription, variation and adaptation. There are no Art History 101 courses at the school – no courses “about” anything. The poly-referential historical scope of the studio itself is set up to actualize the integration of art history on the most intimate level. It becomes very clear and at the very outset, that a student cannot possibly proceed in the making of their drawings or paintings, without placing themselves smack into the nexus of that history.”

Short film about the Jerusalem Studio School and its Hall of Casts

Who took the lead out?

Painters who use some form of lead white are now noticing significant problems with finding Flake White, Cremnitz or other forms of lead white from most of the major art supply websites. Dick Blick and others state that various brands of lead white are on back order and should be shipping in March but I’m not convinced this is accurate, as of this writing it’s increasingly unclear when lead white will be available again and at what cost. I asked a spokesperson from Old Holland on their facebook page about this concern and they told me:

The pigment we use to make this product is very scarce. Therefore, we are not able to produce large amounts. Eventually we will not be able to make the product anymore as the pigment runs out. Also, it is a lead white (poisonous), so a dangerous product, which is a reason for some shops to stop selling it. Some shops may still have it in stock, however not always ‘on the shelves’.

Some painters who use lead white are worried we could soon come to a point where – perhaps for the first time since the Pyramids where built – painters will be unable to obtain lead white in an affordable manner.

If you are able to find any lead white at all it is likely to be priced at a level no mere human could afford. Old Holland Cremnitz White, the preferred brand of lead white for many painters, has had production discontinued – The Italian art store used to be one of the cheapest places to buy OH Cremnitz around 45 dollars for the 225 ml tube, it is now priced at $276.00 if you can get it at all. Some painters were lucky to have stocked up with enough lead white to last for some time but for many of us are now faced with what to do now. There are a few smaller paint manufacturers and boutique-type dealers who still sell some form of lead white but tend to be expensive and in smaller quantities. Vasari, for instance, has flake white available but is now $105.30 for a 175 ml tube and $34.75 for the 40 ml tube.

With the limited amount of information available on this subject it is only natural that painters assume that the reason for the shortage and price increases are due to new rules and regulations regarding the sale of lead paint to artists. There have been restrictions placed on artist’s lead paint in the UK and EU which require the paint to be sold in child-proof containers, such as with “chalk gun type tubes” but other than that it is completely legal to sell artist grade lead white and to my knowledge no new legislation is pending in the US.

Lead paint in the EU is now being sold in paint cartridges instead of tubes.

The reason for the shortage is more due to manufacturers stopping production due to there no longer being enough demand to make production profitable. This is due to lead paint being restricted or banned for anything other than artist’s paints. Sadly there just aren’t enough painters buying lead white to make full production worthwhile for these manufacturers. Apparently all but one manufacturer in the US has stopped production. I had a long talk with George O’Hanlon from Natural Pigments who explains what is happening in more detail later in this article.

What is so special about lead white?

If you don’t use some form of lead white yourself you may wonder what all the fuss is about but for the painters whose use of lead white is essential to their painting this will be a difficult hurdle to overcome. Lead White in some form has been used by painters since antiquity prepared from metallic lead and vinegar. Lead white was the only white used in European easel paintings all the way until the 19th century when Titanium White was introduced. All the great masters used lead white and for such painters as Rembrandt, his brushwork and paint surface could only have been made with his particular manner of using of his recipe of white lead.

There are many reasons why the use of lead white is desired by many painters, most frequently people report it is because they prefer the way the paint handles and the resulting superior paint surface and texture. You can smoothly drag longer brush strokes on your canvas that will better retain the look of the paint as it was first laid down without the leveling or flattening out of the paint i.e. retains the topography of the brush stroke. Which some painters prefer in order to accentuate the animated, expressive quality of the paint surface.

Some feel lead whites are better able to work with close valued colors where there are many subtle color gradations and color interactions. Occasionally you will hear people say that you are less apt to get a chalkiness to your color compared to when using Titanium. I suspect this may have more to do with the skill of the artist in getting the right color tone but the weaker tinting strength of lead white may help make this less of a problem as you are able to more easily obtain very subtle value changes unlike titanium which can easily over-power if you aren’t careful.

Lead white is a warmer white that mixes well in high keyed paintings commonly seen with many figure paintings. Sometimes the artist paint manufacturers will add Zinc or Titanium to cool or brighten the naturally warmer tones of the lead white. I can’t imagine Lucien Freud’s figure paintings could be made with anything other than the Cremnitz white I understand he used. It also has a slight transparency that is preferred in some situations. I’ve personally found that due to lead whites lower tinting strength (compared to Titanium) I wind up using far less expensive pigments in tints than if I were using titanium white. Thus making the increased cost of using lead white less of a concern. Additionally lead whites offer a stronger paint layer and dries faster than other whites.

Isn’t lead extremely poisonous?

You might ask if lead white is so superior why don’t more painters use it? Obviously, the widely known toxicity of lead scares away many painters. Painters working in small home studios, who have children, pets or similar concerns about keeping loved ones safe of course have legitimate concerns. Truthfully, I’ve known many professional painters as well as part-time hobbyist painters who aren’t careful or serious enough about their use of art materials and these people are better off staying away from paints with toxic pigments.

However, when used in a rational manner with careful and routine safety precautions it is safe. After all painters have been using lead white for hundreds of years, many such as Lucien Freud, Monet, Titian and Rembrandt lived long, full lives.

Lead is most easily transferred to the human body through inhalation, so best to stay away from any lead dust or particles unless it is in a highly controlled situation where you know exactly what you are doing and use a NIOSH respirator. Lead dust could be formed from small particles scraped from palette or the canvas. Large amounts of dried paint on clothing is another potentially overlooked trouble spot.

Some important considerations for safety with lead paint will be obvious such as wearing Nitrile, Neoprene or latex gloves while you paint. Lead is not readily absorbed through the skin, but has been documented for this to be possible. Don’t smoke, eat or drink while painting, don’t sand the paint surface, use care when scraping dried paint off the canvas so that the scrapings don’t then become ground to dust underneath or otherwise get tracked or airborne. Wet mop and or Vacuum regularly around where you paint to prevent a build up of paint dust. Care with disposal of paint rags with lead paint, and paint residue from solvent jars. It isn’t just lead paint as Cadmium pigments, cobalt, etc. This all should be considered hazardous waste and treated accordingly as part of standard studio practice. Much of this is true for many pigments, not just lead paint.

Lead manufacturing isn’t what it used to be

In a long facebook discussion thread started by Israel Hershberg about this subject, George O’Hanlon from Natural Pigments stated “The manufacturing of basic lead carbonate pigment is gradually disappearing since most industrial countries began prohibiting its use in paint since the 1970s. Although artists materials manufacturers were exempt from this prohibition, the pigment manufacturers responded to the decreased demand by producing less. Some manufacturers stopped producing it altogether, such as Chemson in the UK did last year. This means it is becoming more difficult to obtain and more expensive.”

“Another problem is that some manufacturers may be purchasing normal lead carbonate instead of basic lead carbonate. Normal lead carbonate was rarely used in painting, because it does not react to vegetable drying oils, such as linseed oil, as does basic lead carbonate. This is a very important point and one that the artist must be aware of, if she or he purchases the pigment to make their own paint, or buys an oil color from a small manufacturer who has not tested their pigment source.” (note: George also told me in phone conversation that most lead paint being manufactured in China and India is likely to be the normal lead carbonate that is unsuitable for artist grade paint)

“Also keep in mind that the names “Flake White” and “Cremnitz White” are fanciful names used by artists’ materials manufacturers to designate differences in their product lines in how they make their lead white oil paints. However, these names used to designate differences in the pigment sources in previous centuries, specifically the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, all manufacturers grind make their lead white oil colors using basic lead carbonate pigment made according to one of the modern processes that in the early 20th century replaced the old methods used since antiquity. This old method, known as the “stack process” or “old Dutch method,” results in a much different particle morphology (size and shape) than the modern process. The result of this difference can be readily experienced in how the paint handles. Yo can read more about this method in an article on the Natural Pigments web site This is a fascinating article that has many photos to illustrate the process.

I asked George what difference was there between the various brands of what they call Cremnitz white and he said that the lead pigment is the same basic lead carbonate the only difference is in the type and amount of oil the company adds for a binder resulting in differences in stiffness and handling. Additionally some companies will add Zinc White, Titanium White and other mixtures to the lead but the lead pigment is all pretty much the same. Also there has been concern voiced by some conservators and artists about the wisdom of adding various percentages of Zinc white into the paint. Studies have suggested (although not yet proved) that Zinc white in certain amounts and situations could result in paint embrittlement and crack and/or have problems with delimitation, especially with paintings done on a flexible support such as canvas. George O’Hanlon also has a comprehensive article about the potential problems and the caution you should take with using Zinc white. It was interesting to note in his article how often manufacturers add zinc white to their paint.

Natural Pigments offer a lead white both made with with the modern method as well as the traditional stack process method, which they sell in small cakes that you then need to grind and add your preferred oil to bind it with. I’ve yet to try this but I’ve read reports from painters who state this is a superior, exceptional white that is very different in handling.

A recipe to make your very own lead white, cheaply

Luis Martinez Borrero, a painter from Puerto Rico, was also writing on Israel Hershberg’s facebook thread shared how he makes his own Lead White and kindly agreed to let me share with us his recipe for making lead paint…

Ingredients you’ll need to get:

Good quality scrap lead sheets usually sell at a scrap yard for very cheap.
Store bought apple vinegar
Fresh Horse manure (any stable around) if you’re in NY. Brooklyn prospect park stables. They will pay you to take the stuff.
3 plastic containers of large enough to place the lead in. I found an old refrigerator the most useful. A perfect sealed chamber with shelves.

Process
1.Degrease the lead sheets with acetone.
2.Twist the lead sheets into coils.
3.Place the fresh manure into the first pot.
4.Place the second smaller pot inside the manure contained within the first pot. Now fill it with vinegar. You will need a smaller third pot to sit on top of the manure to place the lead coil in. The lead coil cannot touch the vinegar!!
5. Seal the largest container with a plastic lid.
Let it stand for 8-12 weeks. (Outside temperature makes a difference)
6.Remove the coils with good rubber gloves and a good quality noish respirator. Place them immediately under water in a shallow container. Use a plastic spatula to scrape off the sheets. I have found the corrosive reaction to be so strong that the coils dissolve right into the water. Sometimes there is a little lead metal left over. This metal has to be picked out. After you have all your powder settled, you will have to wash the lead acetate out of the basic lead carbonate. This is done as described by Francisco Pacheco in his Arte de la Pintura. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Pacheco) Pacheco apparently was getting a venetian lead white powder that had to be washed. He describes the method in detail. Take the powder and dissolve it with your fingers (use gloves) and empty the milky water into a another container. Do this 8 to 12 times. Get a ph meter (Talasonline.com) take a reading. It should be near 7. Now grind with water on a glass or stone slab. This makes your lead white powder very fine or textured. 1/2 hour for rough grind or 4 hours for German painting. Finally, place the slurry in a small plastic cup and dry it in the sun. If you make 100 grams cups that will be enough for a small tube. If you do not care for all this mess you can purchase it from naturalpigments.com.

They make it very excellent. However my last stack yielded 40 pounds of white lead. Plenty for two lifetimes. My total cost was 88.00 dollars. Three total days of labor. My wife still insists on using Old Holland because she likes the stiffness.

Here are some new photos that Luis Martinez Borrero was kind to send me today showing his process in making the lead white. Pretty amazing and the based on what I can see from the photos, the quality of the paint looks quite good. Note the last three images can be enlarged.

Cleaning the lead strips

Preparing the scrap lead

stack wooden boxes

corroded lead

Washing the pigment

Mulling lead-white on porphyry stone

Finished paint

Brush strokes

(note: see the end of this article for updated information from Luis about his white lead)

Making your own lead paint seems like the best way to save money and perhaps get the greatest satisfaction when it’s all done. However, I can barely follow Ikea furniture instructions and I wouldn’t trust my dog around any horse manure… That said I would be happy to pay someone who was able to safely go through this process and was willing to part with some.

My biggest problem with most of the current commercial offering with lead whites is the increased expense, if and when lead white does become available again. I often use huge amounts of white paint when I work and I can’t afford boutique prices for the “primo” quality flake whites sold in small tube – no matter how reasonable the price may seem from the seller’s point of view.

I had been using the more affordable Winsor & Newton’s Cremnitz over the past year which had been around 50% cheaper than most of the other brands. (price increased to around $30 for the 225ml tube) at Dick Blick – on extended back order – and not available now) So if Winsor & Newton don’t make their lead whites available again around the same price and when my stockpile finally runs out I will have to start looking into the Titanium based alternatives.

Alternative to lead

In researching this issue I ran across a posting made by the Oregon painter Thomas Jefferson Kitts on the AMIEN forum ( The Art Materials Information and Education Network) where he is an an official moderator on AMIEN.
I emailed him to ask his permission to use his excellent piece on how to make a “mock-lead white” using titanium white. He runs a blog, Thomaskitts.blogspot.com that has many interesting articles related to landscape painting and more. He agreed to letting me use part of his article that he just rewrote and posted today on his blog, you can read the full text of the article here.

For Those Who Refuse to Paint with Lead
but Wish They Could. by Thomas Jefferson Kitts

You can create your own “Mock Lead White” with the following:

First, mix a tiny amount of ochre paint into a generous amount of titanium white. This will shift the cool bias titanium pigment has towards the warmer cast of lead. Just a tiny amount of ochre will do. Mix it in thoroughly using a clean palette knife on a clean surface. The slightest addition of a second color will send the white in the wrong direction. (You are just trying to shift the white from cool to warm. Compare your mix against unmodified titanium white. You’ll see how little ochre is required.)

Next, you need to reduce the tinting strength of the titanium in your titanium/ochre white. To accomplish this, you start by mixing some linseed oil into a pile of finely-ground marble dust. (aka, calcium carbonate). Use a hand muller on glass if you have them, or a substantial palette knife on a clean surface if you don’t. Exert a fair amount of pressure as you mix everything together because it must all be well incorporated before the next step. (BTW, marble dust is inexpensive and available at most art stores. Or it can be ordered online.) The consistency of your final oil and calcite blend should equate the consistency of your titanium/ochre white. Now, begin mixing a little of the oil and calcite blend into your titanium/ochre white. As you increase the amount of calcite you are lowering the opacity of the titanium. (As a point of historical fact, Velazquez often worked calcium carbonate into a number earth colors to affect their opacity. Much of the transparent beauty found in his limited palette comes from this trick. You can use you oil and calcite mixture for the same purpose).

And finally, to emulate the impasto effect lead white imparts to a brush stroke, try incorporating a small amount of artist-grade beeswax. (You will find that very little wax is needed to mimic the peaking effect of lead white.) The wax creates a shorter pull to your paint mixture and thus your mock lead white will sustain sharper peaks and striations. Good enough for impasto work. I recommend you add the wax on your palette as you need it and not incorporate it into a tubed mixture. That way you will always have the option of working with a short or long mock lead white.

You will likely want to experiment with different proportions of these additives to find your preferred mock lead, but once you find it take note for future reference. You can then make a large batch and tube it up for later convenience. Sealed properly, your mock lead white should last as long as any other oil paint.

—

Note: Modifying a titanium white paint as described above may be considered within the bounds of sound painting practices so long as the resulting paint doesn’t become oil-starved by the addition of too much calcite. Or, that the integrity of the dried paint film is not compromised by the addition of too much beeswax. But those caveats hold true for any kind of oil paint, not just your blend. The usual and customary cautions regarding the thickness and application of impasto work still apply.

I know that Fairfield Porter experimented at length with a variety of whites and was known to use and be fond of Permalba white and apparently thought it was a good alternative to Lead White. I know quite a few painters express satisfaction with using Permalba. However it does have a high percentage of Zinc white in it (50% I think) so I might be nervous about the issue with embrittleness. There is a Gamblin’s Flake White Replacement that some people say is quite good but I don’t have any experience with it. I believe it also is a titanium and zinc white blend. I’ve read it is much cooler and glossier than lead white and may dry quicker than other titanium blends.

I wish I could end on a more hopeful note but it seems there will be some difficult days ahead getting your lead paint fix.

Addendum to the article – updated information from Luis with more details about the his lead white (from an email I got today)

As for your question asked in the last email. I believe it to be basic lead carbonate. The paint in the photo was bound with just 8 grams of water washed organic cold pressed linseed oil per 100 grams of pigment. It is a highly reactive powder meaning that the mulling action causes the pigment to incorporate perfectly with the oil. The handling properties of my paint are superb and compared with other whites like Old Holland or Natural Pigments the opacity of the paint and other characteristics are practically the same. I have made many stacks and many experiments including different exposure times and the magic number for exposure seems to be 8 weeks. However cold climates can be longer. I have made powders that are too transparent and not very reactive yielding a white that has poor handling qualities and opacity. Recently, I have been in contact with a scientist in the Philadelphia museum who has agreed to analyze my stack pigments. I have done some extensive research about the neutral vs the basic lead carbonate and to my surprise the modern industry standard for lead white seems to be 27% lead hydroxide 73% neutral lead carbonate. However, in the old whites they have found these numbers to be in the range of 50/50 or 40/60. These numbers make sense when many factors affect the outcome of your stack. I have no scientific conclusive proof as of yet that I have a basic lead carbonate in my hands. However I am manufacturing these pigments based on my training in pigment making with Peter Trubig in New York. He had supplied many painters with materials and was by all standards an expert in his craft. I will be sure to follow up with the scientific results of my white. In the meanwhile I hope this email has been helpful.

I was fortunate to meet Yael Scalia in Italy during the JSS summer program in Siena a couple of summers ago. I was smitten by her work and insights into painting and find myself returning to her paintings time after time for inspiration and ideas. I am delighted that she was able to share thoughts with us about her work and process in an email interview recently and to show us her latest group of new paintings. Yael Scalia was born in New York City and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She has lived and worked in Jerusalem since 1984 and is married to Israel Hershberg. She is currently represented by the Rothschild Fine Art in Tel Aviv, Israel and previously with the Ice Gallery, New York. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections internationally.

Larry Groff: What led you to decide to become a painter? What are some of the biggest influences that led you to become the painter you are today?

Yael Scalia: Although I didn’t actually conceptualize “being a painter” as a calling until I was well into my twenties, I did, even as a little girl, talk about being an artist and loved to color and draw. When I was about 5 I had a coloring book which my grandfather once colored in for me, using all kinds of colors and blending them – rather like Renoir might have colored – and I remember that this completely enchanted me and I saved this picture. My grandfather was a furniture designer and did some drawing and watercolor on the side, and he taught me how to draw, that is, how to measure when drawing, when I was nine years old. When I was about 11, my mom put me into a Saturday morning watercolor class in the neighborhood, where I learned the basics of watercolor technique – how to lay down a wash, how to save out whites, lift off color, etc. Painting with watercolors, using a brush, was very natural for me, and I continued to do it for my own pleasure until I went away to art school.

Art school, which was the Rhode Island School of Design, was a descent into confusion, or rather chaos. I started in painting but concluded quickly that there was no one who could teach me to paint there, switched to graphics, then dropped out and moved to New York where I thought I would become a painter but just didn’t connect with the right people and did not find a teacher. The next few years were spent doing all kinds of things, but painting and drawing, and the sense that I should be doing them, were always there. Finally, when I was 27, I enrolled in a summer course at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I chose this course on the basis of its title, “Using the Nude in a Universal Story-Telling Picture Situation”, and it was being taught by an Israel Hershberg. The first day in class I realized that this was really what I wanted to do, and told Mr. Hershberg so, who, looking at my canvas conceded “Yeah, I think you got something there.” As it turned out, Mr. Hershberg was finally a painting teacher who seemed to actually have something to teach, and I recognized this immediately.

Even Sapir Street Before Construction

Iraqi Park, Winter 2

The first painters I became familiar with as a child were Renoir and Matisse, because my aunt gave me a little Skira book on Renoir when I was around 10, and a little book called “Jazz” which was Matisse paper cuts. I loved these and looked at them a lot for a few years. My mother loved Corot, so he was a presence throughout my childhood and we always looked for him in the museums, which we did visit. And my aunt would take me to MoMA when I visited New York. At home we had a series of books from the Met called (I think) “What Is Painting?” which interested me greatly and which I read when I was 12 years old. So by the time I began to study with Israel Hershberg, though I knew nothing about painting with oils, I felt familiar enough with the art of painting that everything seemed to fall into place. I took his class “Copying from the Old Masters” and began to copy paintings in museums, which was all the formal painting instruction I received at that time. These copying experiences were extremely valuable – they taught deep looking at painting, and developed thinking about strategy in building a painting through learning the techniques of the Old Masters. They also kept me in the museums for good stretches of time. I had just taken a studio and had begun painting there, and felt like a fish thrown back into the water.

This period was a time of discovery, and I was pretty excited about most of the painters I looked at. We went to see a fantastic Balthus exhibit at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, where some of his big paintings were being shown – The Canyon, which is now at the Met, the two Japanese paintings with the figure on the floor, that green one with the girl in the fanback chair. These really bowled me over and I began to look at him a lot. I loved his classicism and connection to the old masters, his light and color, and just the rational, elegant way he handled paint. I also studied the paintings of Chardin, the sepia drawings of Claude Lorrain, Edwin Dickinson, Corot, Degas, Derain, Matisse. Then I saw a book on Morandi for the first time and that was quite a primal experience. Although I had never seen his work before, I immediately recognized something that was deeply familiar, somehow known to me. He spoke a language which was obviously esoteric and highly personal but which I understood. It was not just an identification with his sensibility, but an encounter with the possibility that painting could lead to a very personal vision and expression. Morandi is still a key for me, a portal to the seat of sensitivity in myself and my deepest responses to the visual world.

Red Hillside, Jerusalem

Country Path, Toscana

Still Life with Coffee Bag and Lemon, 35.9 X 33.9 cm, oil on canvas mounted on board, 2009

Years later, when we began to spend summers in Italy, seeing Roman fresco painting left a similarly deep and indelible impression. I had connected with this source period of painting years before through books, but seeing the actual frescoes, experiencing the beauty of their color and handling, their balanced compositions and measured intervals, was extremely exciting for me and became an ideal which still leads me. Italy in general has been very formative. The great works we return to year after year – the Pieros, the Giottos, the Brancacci Chapel, San Marco, Museo Morandi, the masterpieces of Siena, are new and profoundly moving each year. I have always been attracted to great art that possesses a degree of primitiveness – like many of the frescoes and works of the early Renaissance. I find it to have a certain power, a special beauty, and I think seeing the great masterpieces and antiquities of Italy planted in me the desire that my work should feel connected to these wonderful works of the distant past.

transcriptions from Giotto, 2010 oil on paper

For a long period, too long, I made money doing illustration, which, though not painting, was not a total waste of time. My drawing developed, as did my ability to build pictures from my imagination, I became proficient with crowquill pen and ink. I worked a lot with water-based paints, and this impacts my handling of oil paint to this day. Of course, spending my life with Israel, a great painter and gifted teacher, has been and continues to be basic, essential, constant. And my contact with the JSS is extremely nourishing – I’ve been kind of an external student and it has become very important to be connected to a group of serious, committed painters, the many gifted artists who have come out of the JSS, and the wonderful teachers who have come as guest artists. I have learned from all of these people, I’m inspired by their work, and everyone is very generous.

View of the Old City, Oil on cotton mounted on board, 20×25 cm / 2006

View over the Certosa Garden, Toscana

LG: What are some of the most important considerations for you in making a painting?

YS: I want my paintings to be beautiful and I’m an apostle of Ingres’ statement that in all beauty there is strangeness. I’m looking for a certain kind of poetry in painting, and sometimes the most mundane subjects can be the vehicle for that. Subject does not possess significance; how I paint it endows it with meaning – or unimportance. Poet Wallace Stevens said it nicely: “Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

The search for what satisfies me in a painting can sometimes be arduous. I can start, wipe out, start again, wipe out. I’m frequently preoccupied with a particular great painter or period in art history, but if I go after that too consciously it usually doesn’t work out, because painting really has to come from the gut, not from the brain. Where I am seated inside myself, and the relation I feel to my subject at the moment of putting color on canvas is perhaps most essential. Motif is cardinal, it is the painting. But the language of the paint itself, those transparencies, impastos, brushstrokes, scrapes, scratches, accidental edges, movements and passages, is probably the most seductive aspect of painting for me, to the point that it can become a distraction from fundamental problems in a painting.

Structure is essential; I need to have a very strong sense of the skeleton of the painting and of the big movements from the start. Color, the rightness of the relationships, makes or breaks the painting. Color needs to be beautiful, but also so precise in the context of its relationship to the other colors. If a painting lacks color richness and harmony it is simply humdrum. When I look at great paintings, I’m always impressed by the sense of absolute necessity, inevitability, of one color next to another; it simply couldn’t have been any other way. The strong sense of the reality of a painting is the correctness of its color. It’s really what determines whether a painting is compelling. If I manage to create a harmony and a degree of believability, that’s very gratifying.

The abstract elements of a motif and its pattern of dark and light have to be very clear to me. Shapes need to be wonderful. I like to manipulate shapes for composition, and am drawn by the emotive power of shape. The genius of the Sienese painters in their control of shape has become a preoccupation. Figure/ground ambivalence is something that’s becoming increasingly interesting to me, and I expect will absorb me more with time. Over the past few years I’ve become more interested in a certain tension between the abstract qualities of the surface and the elements of the picture. However, I’m pretty sure I don’t really want to be an abstract painter – I have a desire to depict the world around me, as Albert York said, “put it into a design.” I find it interesting when a painting makes us notice the abstract, non-objective qualities of objects.

Roman Still Life, 42 X 50 cm, oil on canvas mounted on board, 2009

Teverya Street

LG: What aspect of a view attracts you the most to paint? What subject might you consider impossible to paint?

YS: What makes a motif exciting to me is rather elusive; I have to see a painting before me. The first thing I perceive is a composition. I need an interesting arrangement of darks and lights, organized clearly and with visible structure. And a satisfying color statement. If I don’t see a composition out there, there won’t be a composition on my canvas. But all this said, I start the painting as a leap of faith, and with the knowledge that it won’t end up as I think it might, because the painting sort of pushes itself and me forward once it’s started. So much is born on the canvas. If it’s a good start.

Sometimes I fall in love with the shapes in a motif. Or there may be a very striking element that I want to build a painting around, like that red hillside in the Jerusalem landscape. Sometimes a motif reminds me of a painting I?ve seen by one of the painters I love, and that may make it attractive. Occasionally I try to compose a painting using a famous painting as a sort of model – like the Roman Still Life, which was based on a Roman fresco fragment of a still life which I have a poster of in my studio. When I’m attracted by the sheer beauty of something it gets tricky, because I want to avoid simply making a picture of a beautiful place or object. For me, it can be a real challenge to build a composition around a very beautiful thing.

Most of my motifs are found in the places I frequent, the things I look at repeatedly. Frequent and sustained looking becomes more intelligent looking. As Stuart Shils says, “Familiarity is a good thing.” In the studio it’s more difficult, since there I have to generate the motifs by arranging things. This can be the hardest part of still life painting. It’s not only a problem of creating a composition, the objects have to speak to each other in a way that makes sense. Occasionally, I’ll be surprised by seeing something around the house or in my studio, a motif that has just fallen together accidentally like the coffee bag with the lemon that I painted.

What would I not paint? A motif that doesn’t move me, that I don’t find exciting enough to respond to or explore. Again, it’s not a question of the subject itself, but its abstract qualities.

“Steps In Nahlaot”, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 2000.

Olive Trees at Midday, Toscana

LG: Your paintings have a remarkable feeling of light and air, clarity and restraint of tone that make for rich color harmonies. Can you tell us something about your approach to finding the right colors in your paintings. Do you use a particular palette of colors?

YS: My painting teacher was a demanding tyrant when it came to color mixing, and that was helpful! I still use pretty much the same palette I used when I first started painting, with a few additions over the years: Cremnitz white, raw umber, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, quinacridone blue, burnt sienna, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, Indian yellow, cadmium orange, cadmium or other warm green, Veronese green, vert Aubusson or pthalo green, a purple, cadmium red, alizarin crimson.

When I start a painting I usually try to establish a few large areas that make the big statement with color. I spend time mixing on my palette and trying out two or three spots one next to the other to see if they say what they need to say – for example, sky against treetops, rocks, and land, or wall, bowl, tabletop. This is the method taught by Charles Hawthorne in his little book, “Hawthorne on Painting”
, and it’s a good starting point. I try to make the big statement with as few colors as possible. I was taught to make the first few spots really right, not approximate, and I still try to do that. It doesn’t mean they’re never changed later. Actually I try as much as possible to paint as I want it to look in the end, aiming for a premier coup even though I don’t usually finish in one shot any more. I try to follow Lennart Anderson’s rule of comparing colors and looking for similarities – this helps to create unity. For example, sky coIor sometimes serves as the basis of tree or shadow color. I worry much less about literal color than I once did; if I can make a building and the tree next to it out of the same color, I do. If they’re close enough in value in nature, it will work on the canvas. This has developed as I found it necessary to work faster to get down a motif outside – the light changes very quickly in Israel – so I’ve developed kind of a shorthand, which has become my language. Sometimes I lay in a really big area with one color, just building the forms by painting with it thicker or thinner. Then I can go back into that and add accents or local color. If a spot needs adjustment I add color to the spot on the canvas, altering it by mixing on the canvas. If I can’t take a satisfactory step forward in one area of the painting, I move to another area. If an area’s too dark or wrong I scrape it on the spot, and the resulting transparency can sometimes be used. A landscape will sometimes radiate one dominant color, and that will be the key to paint in. Urban landscape is more fragmented and patchy than rural or pastoral areas, and so can be very challenging.

My thinking about and sense of color has changed a lot over the past few years. Color has become much more important in my work and I am finally beginning to compose with color and not just with values. Stuart Shils and Ken Kewley have been great teachers and influences. Ken’s “Notes on Color” are a must read, and I go back to them now and then. I like his rule of starting with your favorite color in the motif. It’s fairly recently that I have begun to improvise with color, make up colors, deviate from nature when I need to. I also like the idea of painting with a color theme, and I do this sometimes in still life. A couple years ago I did a red still life, remembering that Titian said that a painter has to master three colors, red, white, and black. I hope this year to get to black. Painting with gouache has also helped free my sense of color, and is great for thinking economically, learning to say more with fewer colors.

Monastery 1, Valley of the Cross, Jerusalem

Farmhouses, Umbria, Oil on canvas mounted on board, 33×24 cm / 2007

LG: How important is the process of observation to your painting? What are some considerations you think about in finding order out of the chaos and complexity of nature? How do your strike the right balance between simplicity and unity on one hand and variety and contrasts on the other?

YS: Observation is extremely important; it’s the starting point. My paintings are always inspired by what I see, and I draw the basic elements of a painting from what I observe – the general composition, the key of color, the light situation – brightness, degree of contrast. However, I take freely from what I’m looking at, and as I said, it’s only the starting point. Painting involves poetic selection – one doesn’t use everything that appears in a motif, and omission is a powerful tool. A motif is what it says it is – it’s your motive. Sometimes the size or shape of things gets changed in the assemblage of a composition. Sometimes a color gets exaggerated or played down. Sometimes a line or angle gets changed to move the eye more smoothly through the composition. De Kooning has a number of abstract landscape paintings; it’s an extreme example, but he left out most of what he saw yet communicated so beautifully the light, space and feeling of being in that place – its visual impact.

I use a viewfinder, and it’s a great tool for finding compositions. When a motif hits me in the face I usually do a quick drawing, or several drawings of it on the spot, which help me to understand what about that motif really interests me, what I want my painting to be about, where I should crop the image. The virtue of a quick drawing is that you will of necessity filter out all extraneous information and put down the essential elements, the large dark areas, the big lines and angles, that caught your eye. Then I’ll go back to the motif with my paints. Trying to keep in mind what struck me when I first perceived the motif, I usually work directly from the motif two to four sittings, in which the big statement is established. The rest of the painting is finished in the studio, which may involve only one or two sessions for tweaking, or it may take many sessions to reach something that feels like it’s working. The same goes for still life. At a certain point, whatever I was working from becomes irrelevant, because the painting has its own demands which have nothing to do with nature, but are problems in the internal language and life of the painting. It sometimes happens that I reach a point of being stuck, not finding the way to carry a painting forward. If there’s enough I like about it as it is, I just leave it against the wall of my studio and look at it from time to time, and usually, after working on other things, I get an insight about how to move on with it.

Achieving a unity with a happy balance between simplicity, variety, and contrasts is what painting is really about, so there is no simple answer to this question. Hopefully, one sees and isolates a motif because it has this balance of simplicity and variety. The same challenges exists in composing a piece of music or writing a poem. A familiarity with the history of painting is essential. The more one looks at great paintings the more one comes to understand what makes a painting, and one develops their own taste about what they like in a painting, what they want to develop in their own work. Doing transcriptions, with drawing media or paint, is invaluable for internalization of principles. I do transcriptions occasionally, sometimes in charcoal, sometimes with paint.

I was taken aback when a couple of people told me at my most recent show that they found my paintings “relaxing”. Trying not to feel like a failure, I gave this a fair amount of thought, and have concluded that they were responding to the general feeling transmitted by the paintings, which results mostly from color harmonies and the balance of the composition. Balance in a painting is very physical, and by that I mean that it really relates to the painter’s own body and its innate sense of balance. Balance in a composition is felt internally. A painter has to develop a critical sense that is rooted deeply within him, that tells him “that’s too big, that’s too dark, this should be warmer, that needs to move slightly to the left, this should line up with that, it would look better without that, etc etc etc. “ Some of these decisions are made on site, when painting before the subject, some of them are made later on in the process. The point is that this is what painting is, it’s part of the essence of painting, and it’s how art is made. Its a process, sometimes a war, of constant decisions, constantly relating one part of the painting to the part next to it and to all the other parts, until a pleasing balance, give and take, interrelationship of all, works together to create a whole.

Red Still Life , 40,3 X 40,5 cm, oil on canvas mounted on board, 2009

Still Life with Rosebuds, 2008, oil on canvas mounted on board, 20 x 15 cm

Scott Noel: A Life in Paint
By Elana Hagler
(Guest Writer for Painting Perceptions)

As I enter through the door in the side of the large industrial building in Manayunk, a slightly run-down but vigorous town of blockish looking rowhouses inside Philadelphia, I emerge into the convoluted series of hallways lined with artists’ studios, and I immediately feel lost.  Even though I have been here before, I stand still for a dizzy moment, trying to figure out which way to go.  And then, inevitably, Scott Noel’s ever enthusiastic voice rings out from somewhere within this maze, followed by the murmured reply of a conversation partner, and I follow it like a beacon.  As I step into Scott’s studio, the familiar, intoxicating scent of oil paint gets stronger and I am hit on all sides by vibrating, sensuous color…I am Dorothy suddenly transported into a delightfully painterly Oz.  And there stands the Wizard.  But this Wizard is not some larger-than-life phantasm that turns out to disappoint.  In front of me stands a slight, wiry man with an unassuming aspect and a wry and biting sense of humor that covers an incredibly probing mind and a generous heart.  Scott Noel is one of the very few living painters I go to in order to recharge.  Visiting his studio, one becomes more certain of the profound, meaningful seriousness of the artistic endeavor, and of the sheer joy of the struggle.

The walls of his studio are covered, salon-style, with his most recent paintings and drawings.  There are large, multi-figure compositions in oil on lead-primed, rabbit-skin glued linen, hanging alongside lushly painted still-lifes wherein humble plastic knickknacks democratically share the space with vases, art objects and no-longer edible edibles.  Another wall is plastered with pastel figure drawings which Scott creates alongside his students in class and uses as teaching tools.  His paintings often contain allegorical allusions, and reference history, mythology and literature, but yet remain very much models in a studio or the objects of daily life plunked down seeming haphazardly on the studio table.  During a slide show of his work, Scott once mentioned that as he works on a painting, he finds that he starts to tell stories to himself, but that the inspiration for the start of a painting is always a visual, formal investigation.


Studying the Studio pastel 40 x 64 inches 2010

Advent of the Muses, oil on linen, 56 x 72 inches

Orpheus and Eurydice linen 54 x 50 inches 2008

I have had the good fortune of being a student of Scott’s at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as a teaching assistant for a painting course and a friend of many years.  So I feel that I can speak to both his artwork and his role as a teacher.  I have seen the great effect which he has had on so many young painters, many of whom have already become admirable artists and instructors in their own right.  Scott is incredibly giving with his knowledge and always encouraging to young painters.  More than that, he is a model of a life lived in the commitment to the perceptual moment.

Scott paints alla prima (Italian for “at once”), a very direct approach to painting where patches of opaque color are worked wet-into-wet, rather than the slow build-up of glazes over an underpainting, with the goal of a unified, fresh-looking surface and the ability to start and complete large chunks of the painting at one long sitting.  If a day’s work fails to come together at the end of the sitting, Scott scrapes the whole wet area down with his pallet knife, leaving a ghostly image underneath which serves as the platform for entry for the next day’s work.  He always paints directly from life, as he believes that photography does not give enough information to be able to grasp the kind of (in his words) “equivalence for movement, weight, and the interdependence of volume and space” which he is after.

Octavia and Antonia Divide the Empire, oil on linen (two panels), 72 x 108 inches

Jan’s Garden, oil on canvas, 59 x 59 inches

Both in his teaching and in his own work, Scott attempts to negotiate a meeting point between two very different approaches to art-making.  First, there is the color spot tradition passed down from Charles Hawthorne and his student Edwin Dickinson, which is the prevalent attitude espoused by many top-notch realist painters today.  This approach emphasizes the direct laying down of large, flat spots of color with very specifically modulated relationships to one another, where the fine-tuning of color, tone and edge create space, rather than the outlining of objects that are then described with a chiaroscuro approach.  Scott integrates this approach, most especially in his drawings, with a more sculptural rendering of space, looking back to artists such as Michelangelo and Pontormo, where he “de-emphasize(s) contour and light in favor of gesture, mass, cross-contour and changes of state in a graphic investigation.”  All the while, he constantly stresses composition, with the placement of everything within the rectangle being of incredible importance.  Rather than aiming for the maximum contrast of light and dark, Scott keeps his overall tonality in the middle range, which evokes a twilight world of intense and closely modulated color relationships.  At the same time, it is the hunger for the experience in the prolonged moment of painting and responding to the motif, the frantic attempt to grasp and organize all those sensations which are occurring and changing all at once and have to be concretized while the paint is wet, that keeps him addicted.  All this is brought together in very fluid and dynamic tensions, which invigorate his paintings and open up the space for a deeper, more intuitive experience of viewing his work.

Expanding the Convention Center, oil on linen (three panels), 72 x 148 inches

Scott Noel painting, Photo by Mike Manley ( many great photos, artwork and information about Scott Noel on his blog – Drawman.blogspot.com )

Scott Noel is one of the few painters who is not only able to masterfully embody these various struggles and aims in his work but is also able to articulate them in such a way that not only makes them understandable but also seductive to the young painter.  Scott always encouraged in me a love for the wholeness of perception, I would even say the wholeness of existence, accepting even that which is problematic, in the world and in myself, and integrating it and shaping it to try to produce an artwork which is so much more than a mimetic image, but under the best of circumstances becomes a fictionalized embodiment of reality that embraces a more complicated beauty and somehow, deep inside, rings true.

ArtPneuma YouTube video of Scott Noel discussing his painting:

Reclining Portrait of Vivian pastel 30 x 44 inches 2010

Still Life with Amphora and Bread oil on linen 32 x 36 inches 2008

Still Life with Street Peaches oil on linen 46 x 42 inches 2008

Scott Noel painting, Photo by Mike Manley

Scott Noel pastel painting, Photo by Mike Manley

I recently received a wonderful essay from a former student of Barney Rubenstein who is generous and kind enough to share some of his experience studying with Barnet Rubenstein. Barney (as he was known) was an important figurative painter in Boston, painting primarily still-life, often painting take-out food containers, cardboard boxes, jars of cookies, and arrangements of fruits and flowers. Barney taught at the Boston Museum School for 30 years. He showed at Boston’s Alpha Gallery and had a show at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1979 as well as a major retrospective at the Rose Art Museum in 1997 showing four decades of work.

Regretfully, I could only find limited amount of his work online, as I find more images I will put them up here at some later date. I would love to include any information or images that anyone might wish to share. There is an excellent obituary and tribute written by Carl Belz at his Left Bank Art Blog. Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. Carl Belz stated in this blog post that:

Throughout his life—in his art, in his teaching, and in the stories he memorably told—Barney communicated a deep respect for art’s recent and distant past. In this he followed the model he learned as a student at the Museum School more than a half century ago, and he in turn gifted it to the generations of aspiring artists who studied with him, just as he gifted it to countless colleagues and friends, which was always with boundless generosity. He extended the same respect to the humble objects he painted—the fruits and flowers, the cookies and jars and boxes—patiently articulating each of them with nature’s life-giving light and attendant color. We know the pictures came about through painstaking effort and were hard to part with, but we don’t feel that effort when looking at them. We feel instead their joy and wonder, how they justify themselves by merely existing, and we in turn feel as though their maker was grateful simply for the opportunity to bring them into being. Such is the gift of art when it is practiced at its highest level, which is the way Barney practiced and gifted it, and a supreme gift it remains.

REMEMBERING BARNEY RUBENSTEIN by Richard Dean

Before saying anything about Barney I should first say that I’m very aware that (a) memory is fallible, (b) it was a long time ago, and (c) plenty of other people knew Barney better and for longer than I did. Maybe some of them, reading this, will come forward with their own memories and reflections. I hope so.

The Boston Museum School in the mid- 70s was a pretty rough and ready, free and easy kind of place. Once they got the exorbitant $3000 or so that it cost to go there in those days you were pretty much on your own. Students came and went, no one kept a register of attendance, staff brought booze into tutorials and basically you did what you felt like doing, which in my case was goofing off, mostly.

I wasn’t very happy at the Museum School but I stayed for two years and the main reason I stayed was so I could hang around Barney Rubenstein.

Barney (nobody ever called him “Barnet”) was the benign presence around which the noise and life of the Museum School swirled. You might not know who the Principal or the Dean or whatever he was called was, but everyone knew Barney. With his moustache drooping over his mouth, to which a cigarette was permanently attached, his glasses hanging from a chain around his neck, with his Staff ID worn upside down and his, um, deeply relaxed dress sense, you couldn’t miss him. He spoke in a low, slow, drawling voice and you listened because he had been everywhere, had met everyone and had seen everything, apparently. He’d been to France! He lived at the Chelsea Hotel! He knew famous artists! Wow, this guy is the real deal, we thought, and we were right.

As a teacher Barney had no particular agenda; he showed up, he talked, you listened and you learned. He dropped hints, made suggestions, he negotiated with you. “Why do you put that black line around everything?” he asked me once. Because it makes the picture look modern, like a Léger, I said. “Well, it doesn’t. It’s kind of… boring. Maybe, um, you shouldn’t do that”; which from Barney meant that you should absolutely, definitely, positively cease and desist at once from what you were doing and never, ever, return to that particular piece of folly. I dropped that black line like the bad habit it was.

Barney wasn’t one to grab the brush out of your hands and show you “how” to do it. We understood that Barney knew all about how to do it and the various ways one might do it and he wanted us to learn for ourselves how it might be done, not to just obey orders from some authority figure. As a serious artist, he treated his students as colleagues to be consulted, not as inferiors awaiting his instruction.

Grapes, Pear, Apple, 1984, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 10 x 15

Sunflowers and a Rose, late 1990′s, pencil and colored pencil on paper, private collection

He was the least egoistic of teachers; he wanted to hear about your ideas and intentions a lot more than he wanted you to hear about his. We were mostly young kids, fresh out of high school. Barney was the first grown up who ever took us seriously and was interested in what we were saying and that means a lot to a young person.
In art, Barney had very broad taste. Personally he liked Peto and Harnett and Balthus but he also liked Rauschenberg and Guston and Alice Neel and Richard Estes and Robert Smithson. He told me about how good Sylvia Mangold, who was just starting out then, was but he told me about Robert Mangold too.

He made us laugh. “What were you doing, living for so long in Aix-en-Provence like Cézanne?” someone asked. “Looking for his paint rags” Barney said. One night Gabriel Laderman arrived at some Boston Museum event in this flaming red shirt. “So, are you a follower of Garibaldi now?” asked Barney. I didn’t quite get the reference but I knew it was funny.

Interior / Exterior, oil on canvas, 1981-87

For his students Barney became a model for what a real artist should be. Real artists should work hard, should be open to ideas and experience, should ask questions and look for answers. Real artists didn’t take anything too seriously except for their work, which was absolutely serious and real artists didn’t pay any attention to fashion or fame. Real artists looked at everything and knew the whole history of art and kept on learning, always. Art was slow and real artists took their time.

In those days the Museum School and the Boston MFA were boiling hot beds of Greenbergian formalism. According to the Contemporary Art Department of the MFA the only people who mattered were Tony Caro and Ken Noland and Jules Olitski and any painting that wasn’t Color Field didn’t matter, especially if it was representational. Barney paid no attention to any of that stuff, he built an 8 foot square wooden frame and divided it with a grid of string and set it up on the studio floor between his still life set up and his painting table and got to work like it was 1500 and he was Albrecht Durer.

Once Barney painted ocean liners and race horses but latterly he did still lives and interiors. Simple subjects; jars full of biscuits, pieces of fruit, the view from his window, a pile of cardboard oyster pails and he painted them really, really slowly. Fruit would rot and plants would wither before Barney had even got close to finishing his paintings of them.

There’s no painterly rhetoric in Barney’s work, no slapped on paint or busy brushwork or compositionally convenient drips. Everything is restrained and steady, everything has been thought about. He might have studied with Kokoschka but there’s no angst or hot emotion in what Barney does, it’s all much more subtle, considered and cumulative. Everything is there for a reason. His pictures took a long time to make and they can take a lot of looking. That the longer you look, the more you see is a cliché but in Barney’s case it’s absolutely the truth.

Barney drove dealers and collectors nuts because he didn’t work to make them happy and that, along with his more or less total indifference to furthering his “career”, is probably why he wasn’t better known in his lifetime. He could have been but he didn’t care about that stuff, not really. He cared about painting and smoking and talking, especially about painting. Always painting.

Richard Dean attended the Museum School from 73-75, then moved to New York and went to the Art Students League before moving to the UK where he’s lived for the past 20 years, teaching at the art school in Canterbury as well as working at the Canterbury College.

Here is some brief YouTube film footage of Monet painting. AD Films and Nick Wallace Smith made this film available of Monet painting his Giverny water lilies in plein-air. Regretfully you aren’t able to see much of the actual painting but I’m inspired by seeing a great painter working on a huge canvas under two white umbrellas while hand-holding a huge palette with no gloves, smoking and wearing perfectly lily-white formal attire which smartly covered his generous frame.

Many of today’s plein-air painters should consider this when trudging out with their stingy palettes attached to their tiny little pochades holding 8 by 10″ panels. I suspect that Monet is wearing his usual attire and didn’t dress up for the camera. There is a whole art to keeping yourself clean and not to get paint everywhere while holding the palette with brushes, paint rag, medium, etc. The quest for comfort and convenience causes many painters to lose the many advantages that hand-holding a large palette offers, such as being able to mix colors while standing further back from the canvas, being able to angle the palette away from the direct sun, and ample mixing area with large amounts of paint. Great painters can “play” their palette like a great violist and their violin, mixing colors on the palette instinctively from long years of daily practice. Monet himself painted in his old age despite severe cataracts and compromised vision.

Monet’s Palette – (manipulated slightly in photoshop to enhance readability) original photo located at this link by photo by Amy K Jensen taken at the Musée Marmottan in Paris.

Asked in 1905 what colors he used, Monet said: “As for the colors I use, what’s so interesting about that? I don’t think one could paint better or more brightly with another palette. The point is to know how to use the colors, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit. Anyway, I use flake white, cadmium yellow, vermilion, deep madder, cobalt blue, emerald green, and that’s all.”

A couple of site with some good basic information on Monet’s palette Colors of Monet
and on the My French Easel Blog.

Some choice Claude Monet quotes:

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.

Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.

Critic asks: ‘And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?’ – ‘The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.’

You’ll understand, I’m sure that I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. It’s my own fault. I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out. Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes 3 or 4 minutes at most…

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.

It really is appallingly difficult to do something which is complete in every respect, and I think most people are content with mere approximations. Well, my dear friend, I intend to battle on, scrape off and start again…

I’ve done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don’t want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that’s enough.

Think of me getting up before 6, I’m at work by 7 and I continue until 6.30 in the evening, standing up all the time, nine canvases. It’s murderous…

The above quotes and many more excellent Claude Monet quotes (120) can be read on Robert Genn’s vast collection of artist’s quotes.