Four Cats Visit the Sites of Duccio's Maesta Altarpiece

This is a set of small canvases that started a series in which the settings of old paintings or prints, mostly Italian Renaissance, were stripped of their figures, and other people, or in this case cats, enter the spaces to look around like tourists visiting an alternate universe.  In this case, the four cats visit the place of the washing of the feet (upper left), the site of the denial of Peter (upper right), the appearance before Pilate (lower left), and in the lower right, Four Cats Eat up the Leftovers at the Last Supper.  They were painted many years ago and several years have passed since the last of the cats died in extreme old age. Tempus fugit and I am not getting things done.  I work constantly, but the fall semester is always a challenge.  This is a brief break and a bit of whimsy to keep the blog alive.  

Solitude and Lastingness

Here is Murr, my cat who died about 5 years ago, caught in the act of writing a book.  He was with me for 21 years, a large part of my life.  He was an intelligent cat and a good companion.  It's a commonplace that creative people prefer the company of cats to dogs.  Cats allow you to concentrate on work.  Usually.  My current cat, Leonardo, is good company too, but he doesn't quite measure up to Murr yet.  Leo is more demanding and Murr could keep you company while leaving you to do your thing. You could also say that Murr had lastingness, an intelligent and active kitty to the end.  He was the equivalent of 118 years old.

I've recently read two books, Solitude by Anthony Storrs and Lastingness by Nicholas Delbanco.  They had been on my to-read-some-day list for some time, but I did not know that one would speak to the other and quote it so much.  They both deal with the life of creative people.

Solitude investigates the need of some people for a way of life that most people today find puzzling and unattractive, and even judge it to be an unacceptable choice even for others, that is the inclination to be alone, to read, to think, to create, to make things or solve problems.  We live in a society that more and more values the outgoing charming personality and team activities over the introspective and solitary person.  Storrs inspects the lives of many famous creative people in history who would fall in that latter category.  He thinks the prejudice against such people may waste much of human potential.  You can see it in action when the college scholarships all go to those who can command leadership roles and win elections in the personality contests of political positions.  Emily Dickenson and even Albert Einstein would lose out in this competition.

The other book, Lastingness: the Art of Old Age, was about the question of creativity in old age.  The common wisdom is that new ideas and innovation in the arts and science are the work of the young.  We cease to create in mid life.  This is also just a cultural prejudice.  The many examples he explores can be inspirational, which is why I had it on my list.  I'm going to need to live to 100 and keep working to get all the work I have begun finished.  I need all the inspiration I can get. He also looks at the opposite situation, at some who lost it in later life but kept working anyway, like the poet Holderlin.  His life may have been better for his continuing to write poems, but the poems were terrible.  Still the numbers of great thinkers and creators whose work only got better and better are sufficient to blow away the false conclusion that decline is inevitable.

I am encouraged also by the example of Frank Lloyd Wright (my first hero--I told my mother when I was 4 that I was going to study architecture with him at Taliesen West, but he died the next year).  He was retired early after the scandals of his personal life, but returned to work at 55.  If he hadn't, he would only have designed some nice houses.  All his most famous and grander work was done after the age of 55.  And Hokusai is even more amazing.  In his notebooks he wrote that he drew obsessively since the age of 6, but nothing he did before the age of 70 was worth much.  And it's true -- his famous work was all done after the age of 70, including the Great Wave Off Kanagawa.  There is maybe time yet.

Buddha of 10,000 Colors

I have played around with the look of the blog, and it occurred to me that you might like to know the source of the header image.  This is a painting I did a few years ago called Buddha of Ten Thousand Colors.  It is approximately 4' x 4' and divided into a grid of just about 10,000 patches.  Some patches are layered colors - wet on wet, glazed, scraffitoed, or scumbled; it has a lot of texture up close. So it really has more than 10,000 colors. Unfortunately the color isn't quite right in a photo and I can't seem to improve it much with photoshop, but these tiny photos are just an approximation anyway. It began when I was zooming in on a picture I took in the Botanical Gardens of Honolulu.  The Buddha sculpture was carved out of grey rock but there wasn't a single pixel of grey in the photo!  There was something about that that tickled my fancy so I attempted to reproduce as close as I could each pixel's color, comparing it as I went to its neighbors for hue, saturation, and brightness.  Each square was painted separately and its colors mixed separately.  I don't want to think of how many hours that took.  Why do I always set myself such labor intensive problems?  But at least this one had a definite end.  In the gallery, most people couldn't see the face when they were within normal viewing distance.  It just looks like a riot of color patches.  You must back away many feet to see the face.  Shrunk down as on this website is like being very far away.  Some people never see the face.  I can't not see it no matter how close I get.  From a great distance it becomes grey once again like the stone sculpture.  I like to play with people's perceptions like that.  This is the opposite of how the trompe l'oeils I used to paint would operate.  They held their illusions at every distance no matter how painterly they were done, and they fooled some people so well that a woman once chewed a gallery director out for leaving the boxes of junk on the floor (the paintings were very deep sided and sat on the floor, painted to look like worn out dented marked up old cardboard boxes full of stuff.)  One time I had to pick a painting up and show some skeptical viewers the inside so they could see that it was stretched canvas.  One screamed.  Sometimes people don't like to be fooled so much.  Those paintings used to get kicked as well, and they aren't that easy to display or store.  The cats used them as hammocks when I left them around the house which stretched the tops out of shape, so I stopped doing such paintings.

Still Life with Open Book

This is a painting that I made several years ago.  Yes, it's terribly old fashioned.  It looks like it could have been painted in the 19th century except for the fact that the objects are from recent times.  The central object is a book called The Look of Reading, opened to a page that includes a painted illusion of a photograph of an open book with painted images on its pages.  I call this layering of self-references a "reality sandwich".  The words on the page are about books with paintings of images of books with paintings in them . . . .  They also discuss the readability of the type and how Jan van Eyck is the greatest master of the readable painted book or page.  The drawing covering the other page has doodles and a sketch that appears to be the thumbnail design of this painting.  Yes, that is a painted illusion of a fly on the upper corner of the editor's desk.

I did this painting because I love books.  They have been my companions since I was less than 3 years old.  I taught myself to read and could get through an entire book (e.g. 4th grade reader from the 20's) at 3.  It's an obsession I guess, and a rather unfortunate one.  I now realize that too much reading and drawing at an early age exacerbated my myopia.  When I get a new book, or even borrow one, I examine it with most of my senses -- I smell the pages and lightly run my fingers over the paper, the cover too if it has embossing or an interesting texture, enjoy the quiet sound of the binding as it opens, or flex a paperback and listen.  A nice scrunchy sound can be heard in many thicker paperbacks especially if there is a little kaolin in the paper.  I undress hardcovers to check out under the dust jacket, admiring the color of the cloth and the lettering of the title and author's name, the logo of the press.  I read the information in tiny print that tells me when it was printed and all the other editions.  I pause to admire the title page and the choice of type, the arrangement on the page, . . . .  Sometimes I get really close and look at the texture of the fibres in the paper and the slight ragged edges of the inked letters (which is invisible when you are at proper reading distance.)  I check out the back pages: index, bibliography, appendices.  Often I look through at any pictures before settling in to read, beginning with any prefaces, introduction, acknowledgements.  The only thing I don't do is lick it to see how it tastes.  That would be silly.

Digital books can't compete with the printed object for a sensual experience.

I'm Thinking of You, Leonardo - again, update

The large mezzotint.  It's almost finished.  It's a bit later that I expected, but I still want to lighten and smooth the notebook.  Everything else is just about where it should be.  It's very difficult to get a photo that looks like the image.  The slightest imbalance in the surrounding light distorts it.  The lighter greys are darker in this photo than in the actual print.  The mid greys are actually smoother than it looks in a photo, the darker areas are darker and edges and forms meld into each other more (when you expand it; this is darker over all).  But this gives an idea.  Surely I will be finished in a couple weeks.  At that point I will replace this and make sure the new one has the right range and balance of tones. I'm removing the much earlier and rougher image from the earlier post below but leaving the comments (June 22).

Galileo's fingers

Among the displays of telescopes and microscopes, clocks, globes and glass polyhedra, astrolabs and contraptions designed to test or display scientific principles, and many other curious objects to be found at the Galileo Museum in Florence, these are uniquely gruesome (unless you find the sculpted lifesize and very naturalistic body fragment of a pregnant woman dissected also gruesome, but you are thankfully aware that it is a sculpture).  These are fingers cut off of Galileo's hands encased in glass reliquaries, like many remains of saints to be found in medieval cathedrals.  But here no one is sobbing in front of them, pleading with the spirit of Galileo to assist them or leaving post-it notes to the saint as I have seen in places of pilgrimage.  Maybe I should have tried that: "Grant me some genius, O saint Galileo."  The dried flesh has pulled back and revealed bones.  I was a bit daunted and put off looking closely until after I had gone through most of the museum twice and come back to this room.  I think I would rather see the work of his fingers, notes and sketches that would record the movement of his pen and thoughts.  These are just bones.
     I have finally gotten around to reading David Freedberg's The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history.  It is a thorough history and analysis of the work of the principle members of the Academy of the Lynx, the troubles they had with their detractors, and the scientific arguments and problems of the time, mostly the place of images in the attempt to order knowledge.  The relationship of the emblem of the Barbarini bees and the scientific investigation of bees under the microscope is fascinating.  Distinctions between art, politics, fables and other narratives, and scientific inquiry dissolve.  The total natural and cultural worlds are treated as continuous, apparently the ambition of more than one of the group.  They, the Linceans, had the same problem as many of us--very little of their work was finished, partly because of the scale of their ambitions and partly because of the unsolved problems of method.  Most died relatively young (relative to expectations today).  Where I found a new idea to contemplate was in the relation of naturalistic illustration, geometric diagrams, and words.  The first two, being non-verbal like drawings I would have said to be more similar and words the odd man out.  But Freedberg's thought is that diagrams are more like words.  Both abstract nature and therefore allow for categorization.  Taxonomy is made difficult if not impossible by naturalistic images; even when you dissect and reach down inside things they continue to show more and more of the unique and odd features of a thing and not what makes them the same.  What the work of the Linceans revealed is that the world of nature is not a set of clearly distinguished species that each member of which can be set in a box and, as Aristotle claimed, be altogether the same within the group and that which is outside altogether other.  Instead, the world of nature is a continuum with fuzzy edges between things.  Even animal, vegetable, and mineral are liable to be mixed or ambiguous.  So categories and order come not from reality but from human reason alone, therefore only abstracted languages are suitable to clarify the order.  Naturalistic illustrations reveal the blurs between things.  The question of whether fossils are, in the case of petrified wood for example, vegetable or mineral can't be answered with a picture.
     This put me in mind of the question of color.  When we identify colors using basic color terms, as Berlin and Kaye showed in their surveys of people around the world, we are liable to put color chips on the fringes of a color group in one category one day and another on another day.  In other words, a reddish-orangey color will be put in the red box sometimes and other times in the yellow.  Individuals actually varied more from day to day within a language group population than between different cultures.  This suggests that categorizing color is a subjective thing.  But, contrary to expectations, people everywhere select what we call the 'pure' color as the center of the color group.  In other words primary red is always red and this even holds in places where there is no basic color term for a color (red's a bad choice though, there's only one language known to lack a name for it).  In the end it appears there is something about the categorization of colors that is subjective, something inter-subjective (cultural), and something beyond that transcends culture, language, and individual choice.  In other words, there is something about the categorization of colors that is 'natural' and not reliant on reason or learning alone.  Might this also not be true of species, even though, further complicating the matter, they also change over time?  Are illustrations indispensable to this understanding?

Arrivederci Florence

It's over.  Been over for a few days, but I've been horribly ill.  No more searching for the dome in order to find my way 'home'.  No more rooms full of people intensely interested in Leonardo da Vinci.  The weeks leading up to the Leonardo institute were just as intense as I spent as much as 18 hours a day reading and preparing.  The weeks there in Florence were packed with unusual experiences.  (So was Florence packed, with tourists, so I didn't get many good pictures.)  We met and heard from a dozen of the finest scholars and saw Leonardo paintings and drawings up close and uncovered.  Now it is back to the usual grind, but I am going to try to make some permanent changes in what I do from now on.  Having read over and over reports of Leonardo's death and his supposed last words (Was anything done?), and having heard a remark by Martin Kemp on the bus back from Villa I Tatti that it is what one does with one's talent that matters, I realize with some horror that I share with Leonardo his worst trait -- I never quite finish things.  Beginning things is so interesting that it takes one away and anyway there is so much to do I stagger from one obligation or meeting to another, but that is making excuses.  I also heard once that one should never repeat anything so all my papers at conferences have been new and different from each other.  Even my prints and paintings are mostly unfinished.  So now I have over 20 years of incomplete projects.  I am going to line them up in an order taking into account some have due dates and some are further along than others, and then finish things one after the other and get them out into the world.  It may still be slow going as I tend to choose labor intensive projects. Someone (Seneca?) once said that when you die no one gives a damn what books you have read.  I take this to mean that you must do something with what you learn and give it to others.  Something more than just the day to day teaching, which is like washing dishes.  So I vow to finish things and send them out.  Let those who read this blog be witness as to whether I do this in the years to come.

Sta Maria della Grazie in Milan

Yesterday we spent the entire day in Milan.  First we visited the Ambrosiana Museum where Pietro Marani gave us a tour and we ended by seeing the display of original pages of the Codex Atlantico in the library.  I couldn't take pictures inside, but it is another beautiful space with floor to ceiling, wall to wall books.  Then we went to the Castle of the Sforzas where we were treated to a very thorough history of the attempts to restore the Salla delle Asse, and finally to Santa Maria della Grazie to view the Last Supper.  The panoramic picture above is of the piazza in front of it; the little yellow building to the left of the church is where one enters.  Again, no pictures allowed.  This was a perfect day.  Long, exhausting, perfect.  Today I visited the Ghirlandaios in Santa Trinita, Brunelleschi's Santo Spirito, and the Capella Brancacci in Santa Maria delle Carmine.  Had the place virtually to myself for an hour.
Earlier in the week, Tuesday, we spent hours at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure viewing the restoration of the Adoration of the Magi (and also one of the Madonnas of the Yarnwinder that happened to be there at the same time), then Wednesday we spent the afternoon looking at original drawings by Leonardo and others of the 15th century up close and uncovered by any glass or other impediments at the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe in the Uffizzi.  Thursday I trudged about in the Uffizzi for 6 1/2 hours.

18 Views of Verrocchio's Putto

This is a page from my newest notebook. (If you click on these images you get a larger view).  I moved around the wee putto fountain in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio here in Florence, stepping in a circle to capture the figure from all around.  These are quick gesture drawings, no more than five minutes each.  The idea was to get to know the general conformation of the figure in order to carve a similar figure on the peghead of a dulcimer.  Instead of the fishy thing this one holds, my peghead putto will hold a small lute-like instrument.  The sound holes will be the traditional hearts; the sides, back, peghead, and fingerboard are all walnut.

You may wonder why I would draw this instead of take a picture.  Perceptual drawing has many uses beyond capturing an image.  It can be a meditative activity.  It can be used for more expressive imagery.  But most of all it changes how you see.  To draw or to paint is to alter the structure of your mind.  A friend in graduate school experienced a good example of this.  She used to be very bored driving up across the midwest between the university and her home, especially in winter, so she would read novels while driving.  Do not do this!  Anyway, one year she was forced to take three terms of a studio or performance art.  She had never done anything like that.  She chose painting.  Soon she no longer needed the novels for entertainment but she reported seeing colors in the landscape she had never seen before.  The more she painted the more riotous the erstwhile dull grey view became.  Then the three terms were over and she stopped painting to make time for more pressing obligations.  She reported that the colors began to fade, and after a few months she was back to seeing only dullness, but now with the sad memory of having seen something marvelous that she was no longer able to see.

I must be addicted to those colors, and the effects of light and shadow, and the character of lines and textures.  I can't stop drawing and painting and if I'm prevented from doing so I get anxious.  When I can't be wielding pencil or brush, I draw and paint with my eyes and the whole world is a dazzling display of beauty.  I can stare at a glass of water or a shadow on an old wall and be content.  Let me now apologize to anyone I may have stared at a bit much -- I am merely drawing you in my mind.

Max Planck Kunsthistorishe's Reading Room

Here is the spot I just spent 6 hours in, doing some research.  You have to climb ladders to get the books and articles!  This is just one of dozens of rooms with almost half a million volumes mostly on the art of the Italian Renaissance.   I worked non-stop all afternoon and into the evening, and surprised myself by getting through an article in Italian among other things.  The first couple days weren't so pleasant.  My bag didn't arrive when I did and I had to place a claim at the airport.  Then, since I had met two of my fellow institute students and we had agreed to share a cab, I didn't want to hold them up to get Euros.  Big mistake.  Always get your cash at the airport.  I spent many hours the next day searching for an exchange that would cash my travelers checks, running about in the same clothes I had worn and tried to sleep in for 2 1/2 days.  I was horrified to think I had to go to the opening dinner reeking and miserable, but I located an exchange after 4 hours of running about, paid far too much for my Euros, and just in time the bag arrived.  So all is wonderful now.  The first guest lecturer spoke and answered questions all morning, the incomparable Martin Kemp.  He will be the featured guest tomorrow morning as well, then we go to Villa I Tatti, enjoy their research facilities, and have tea in the afternoon.  How civilized.

I'm Thinking of You, Leonardo

[proof removed, see later entry (August 30) for updated image]

Here is the trial proof of the large mezzotint titled I'm Thinking of You, Leonardo.  It is 18"x 24", quite large for a mezzotint.  It is still too dark in places and I will be fussing with the mid to light greys, making some edges sharper and some more blurred, adding more subtlety to the cast shadows and punching up the shine.  About 50 to 100 hours left.  When a good final print is made, I will replace this image with the final result.  But I aim to try to keep the strong sense of darkness in it.  That's what mezzotints do best.

The view is as if you are sitting at the drafting table with a sketchbook open, ready to draw and/or write.  The pencil is handy.  Paint brushes wait on the left side above the notebook.  The objects I gathered up from around my house; all reflect something about Leonardo da Vinci or something you might read about in his notebooks.  The skull and cow's ribs and tail vertebra allude to his interest in anatomy.  The book is obvious; it is Leonardo on Painting.  The title will be more clear when the print is finished.  On its cover is the image of Cecilia Gallerani, one of his portraits, and on the spine you can read the name Kemp, the editor of this book who is the world's foremost authority on Leonardo.  To the right of the book is a strange little glass object, 12 sides of rhomboi, that is so weird it is hard to see it when it is sitting there in front of you.  The twig shows the pattern of its growth in the bumps, preserving in death the incessant slow movement of its life.  Beneath the twigs are the two halves of a geod filled with crystals and another geod is on the other side in the dark area, to allude to his interest in geography.  They also record the growth and movement of what seems so solid and still, the earth.  The loupe and magnifying glass suggest careful observation and the significance of sight in both art and science.  The mathematical object, a model of an icosadodecahedron, is made in the likeness of the drawings he supplied for the book de Divina Proportione by his friend Luca Pacioli.  It is made of a single piece of paper which I drew out, cut, folded, and glued in order to have a model to draw from for this print.  The spiral in the circle  next to the glass of water is a sea shell.  Leonardo liked to think about the fossil shells found on mountains and their implications for the movement of earth and seas.  It is the bottom of a type of shell called a pyramid, but it is actually a cone shape.  It is something of a pun, but you would have to recognize the type of shell to get it.  Of perspective, what Leonardo called the visual pyramid, ancient people called the visual cone.  The feather alludes to his love of birds and the dream of flight.  Ironically, this is a chicken feather and chickens usually can't fly.   The glass of water I put there because Leonardo liked to think about water (mainly its power when moving).  I like the glass of water because it grabs the light and hurls it into the darkness.  Leonardo speaks of the power of light to dispel the shadows. In the depths of the shadows things disappear and edges are lost. Shadows change density and their edges are sharper or fuzzier depending on placement of light source and distance from the objects. Leonardo paid close attention to these things.  I've added also subtle reflections when hard surfaced objects are in contact with the shadowed surface.  The glass sphere is like the crystal orb in the hand of the Salvatore Mundi, a newly rediscovered painting of Leonardo's.  But this sphere contains air bubbles blown in.  In his notebooks Leonardo talks about blowing bubbles in water (glass is a liquid) and how the air becomes light in relation to water and so rises in its desire to be above the water, while the water becomes heavy in relation to the air, until they have reached their place.  But alas this air is trapped in its location and will never reach its heart's desire.

All these connections to Leonardo I must confess I thought of as I was working on the print, having gathered up the objects on impulse and intuitively created this arrangement.

Whether the person sitting at this table is left-handed or right-handed I have left ambiguous.  The brushes are handy to the left hand but the pencil sits on the right.  The magnifying glass, usually held in the off-hand, is also set down as though for the right hand, for a lefty's convenience, and the book is set as though placed by a left hand.  The light is convenient for the left-handed and will shade the attempts to draw or write by a right hand.  Leonardo, they say, was profoundly left-handed.  I am ambidextrous.

The entire image had to be drawn and scraped in mirror reverse 180 horizontal flip.

The whole is lit by two sources of different wattages.  When I designed it, I was doing what I liked to do, making a complex interweaving of the different strengths and directions of shadows.  Would you believe that the work was well underway when I came across in my reading that Leonardo liked to shine multiple point source lights of different wattages on things to play with the shadows too.

I hope to have the final version by August 20.

Super Moon and new camera

Tonight at 11:34 EDT the moon reaches its perigee and within one minute it reaches its fullest.  So I am testing a new superzoom camera.  A gadget, a tiny box no bigger than a pack of cards can take a closeup of the moon.  Not quite as good as Galileo's telescope, but interesting.  The time reported on this blog is incorrect.  This photo was taken at 11:35pm.

Hello, is anyone out there?

Some people have asked me to do this, so here goes.  I'm blogging.  This blog will be limited to news of my travels, research, and art.  I don't care for much of my life to be sucked up into the black hole of cyberspace; I like real life.  So I might not be returning all that frequently.  For starters, I am looking forward to being part of an upcoming NEH institute on "Leonardo da Vinci: Between Art and Science" this summer, to be held at the Max Planck Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence, Italy.  I will post a photo from there.  The image above is a mezzotint "Triple Self-Portrait".  I am an art historian/painter/printmaker and I occasionally build musical instruments.