The Ponte Vecchio (Florence) Mirrored in the Rippling Arno

The Ponte Vecchio Mirrored in the Rippling Arno

The colors in this photo are a little off, so when or if I get a better shot (Photoshopping didn't seem to help) I will replace it.  This is a 24 color reduction woodcut, a process invented by Pablo Picasso.  The wood is a 24" length of  of 18" wide clear pine which came from a plank purchased many years ago when I was a sophomore at college.  The professor of my relief print class, J. Terry Downs, and 2 other students and I chipped in to buy the 8' board and split it between us.  It was relatively expensive even then because as Terry Downs pointed out such lumber was no longer available.  I have carried it around for all these years a bit afraid to use it.  But this summer I figured it should get used and had an image in mind, so here tis. I was emboldened by the thought that I can use the other side for another image later, and maybe even plane it down and reuse the surface several times.  Might as well, since in making a reduction print you destroy the image as you go.  

I aimed to create a balance between three things: the material (wood and ink), the facture (marks of the tool kept visible), and the image.  The close up below reveals some of this better than the full view.  Of course, it is much more visible in person.

For me the balance works, probably because I think of all three things when working on a print or painting.  Some viewers will notice the wood grain carrying through all the layers of ink and the slightly motley texture of the ink (which nonetheless manages to stay flat and matt through all those colors).  Others will note how the image is constructed of marks of the tool which look like gouge cuts rather than trying to follow a more precise rendering of contours and textures, rather like the brushstrokes of a Chinese ink painting.  I often think about Xie He's 6 Principles which recommend first and foremost to render not the outward appearance but the spirit of the thing, and secondly how the brushstroke is the 'bone' of an image.  But others will see most clearly the represented image.  Whatever you find interesting (or not), isn't it amazing that something that doesn't resemble the thing portrayed (the colors are all quite off, the cuts and shapes abstracted and quite different from the 'real' image, whatever that means, the texture, light, all far different from even a photo of the place) nonetheless is readily understood as a representation of a place.  See how the water of the Arno breaks up the image in two ways - the relatively clear striated image where the ripples are large and smooth, created by the downhill movement of the water over the subtle terrain beneath the river, and the choppy blurred image nearly dissolved where wind makes the surface flutter.  Both are just horizontal cuts of the gouge rolled up with many layers of colors, yet something of the reflected buildings are visible like the dream of a memory.  

On Living in a Library

When I finished expanding the shelves on one wall of my study a short while ago, the shelf space more than tripled and books immediately began colonizing the new spaces.  They came from all over the house where they had sat in piles on top of shelves, tables, and wherever.  For the time being there is a little bit of room for more.  Notebooks, sketchbooks, and some art materials and unfinished projects have handy-to-reach places that are now somewhat neat.  Perhaps I will be more productive.

There are more bookcases on the other side of the room not seen here, in all the other rooms, and in the wide front hall, so the little c. 1900 house is well on its way to being the proverbial book-lined cottage, though not nearly so much as the charming one inhabited by the character C.S. Lewis as played by Anthony Hopkins years ago in the film Shadowlands.  I recall being a bit envious of that setting.  

On the turning bookcase side table is a guide to Edinburgh, and a children's book titled Scotland's Story vies for attention with the tv remote and a sketchbook on the ottoman.  I'll be off to 'Auld Reekie' in a short while and will no doubt post some thoughts on the experience upon return.  Meanwhile I travel through a universe of places and ideas in the library.  The books are in disarray, but whole shelves could be filled if I organized them with collections that would reveal obsessions: time, space, perspective, science (esp. physics) and math, history, music history & theory, luthiery, chess, foreign languages, cryptography, ancient scripts, philosophy, Leonardo, and of course art from all times and places.  There is fiction also, but mostly in other rooms.  Historical fiction and science fiction probably outnumber other categories in that.  But from the age of two I have preferred to read non-fiction.  

My favorite poet for 40 years has been Yeats; favorite non-fiction writer for 18 years Martin Kemp, favorite fiction author changes much more rapidly.  For some time Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series held my fascination, then the books of Neil Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon and the immense three volume Baroque Cycle.  That latter has as one of the main characters Sir Isaac Newton.  Leibniz and King Louis the XIV make their appearances.  It leaves you wondering for over 4500 pages why it is categorized as science fiction, why not historical fiction, but then . . . . I won't give it away.  Iain Pear's Dream of Scipio left me pondering for quite some time, and so for a while I read others of his books, all quite good reads.  Enjoyed Robert Harris's Pompeii so much years ago that I tracked down copies of his Cicero books Imperium and Conspirata this summer.  I once wrote a book review of his Pompeii, comparing it with Bulwer-Litton's Last Days of Pompeii.  They are very similar stories with often parallel characters: a hero from out of town, a maiden in distress, an evil priest of Isis. . . , but the comparison reveals the difference of world-views between the 19th century and the late 20th.  One can compare the treatment of his Cicero with that of McCullough's saga.  In her books he is a background character who seems to have sided with the bad guys, while Julius Caesar comes across as heroic and sympathetic.  I got to suspecting as I read the 7-book series that the author was in love with Julius Caesar.  But in Harris's books, Caesar seems the bad guy and Cicero is a very complex and reasonably good character who does the best he can in difficult circumstances.  The more you know of someone, the more you spend time in his house and his mind, the less I think you are likely to judge and dismiss him.  

So many books, so little time.  Now I must get back to work.   

Charlotte Visits the Site of Piero della Francesca's Annunciation, Sant' Antonio polyptych

Charlotte Visits the Site of Piero della Francesca's Annunciation on the Sant' Antonio Polyptych

It is almost to the day 20 years since my friend Charlotte and I visited Perugia while spending a month in Italy.  Perugia is on a rocky steep hill, and at the top you can go down inside the rock.  There underground is a museum dedicated to one painting by Piero della Francesca.  My first thought heading in the door was, we've hiked up and down steep hills and into a cave-like space and paid an entry fee even to see one painting?  It is worth it.

What you see above is a parody of the uppermost portion.  In the interesting architecture were giant figures, Gabriel in the open space where Charlotte is standing and Mary in the covered loggia in front of the dark brown wall.  They filled the space almost to the ceiling of the loggia.  I stretched a canvas in the odd shape that you see here and painted the scene.  The sacred figures have left and Charlotte walks into the fictional space, camera in hand.  It's part of that series that includes the cats visiting sites from Duccio's Maesta (a few entries below).  This was done around 1994?  It's about 3 feet wide.

We spent a couple hours in front of that one painting (the Piero, not mine).  I was fortunate to have a traveling companion who approached things in much the same way as I liked to, slowly.  We would be in line before a place opened and the last to leave.  You could say we have been kicked out of the finest museums in Europe.  By dawdling we even managed to see the Sistine Chapel ceiling with the electric lights turned off and the room empty except for us.  The natural light was fine for viewing, perhaps more like it was meant to be seen.

St. Jerome in His Study After Durer (1995)

  

I made this spoof of Durer's St. Jerome in his Study around 20 years ago.  At the time I was using a MacPlus with a dot matrix printer, which this Jerome has borrowed.  It was the latest thing at the time, or close to it, and now it looks quite antiquated.  Ha.  The print is a simple line etching, 9 x 12 inches.

Good Reads: novels about Leonardo

detail from the ceiling of the Palazzo Zuccaro, Florence

Historical novels are among my favorite indulgences.  Recently, I've read Lucille Turner's Gioconda.  A recommendation from Martin Kemp in one of his books (or was it a talk) set me to looking for this.  The treatment is poetic.  She weaves bits from the notebooks, descriptions of the Italian countryside, imaginary thoughts and conversations, into a narrative that rolls along like felt time.  I was a bit annoyed at the anachronisms, but laughed heartily at the ending, relieved to not have to read yet another account of his possible despair at his death at not finishing much.  But since they were about twenty odd years apart in age, surely it is unlikely Leonardo played with Lisa of the famous portrait when they were children.  I'm not giving anything away here for those who haven't read it; the book begins with that.  Another sort of disruption in the otherwise enjoyable story is exemplified in the misunderstanding of how one would go about making the clay sculpture from which a giant bronze horse would be cast.  A huge block of clay cut into?  No way.  You need an armature, and you need to build it up over that, not carve it down.  And since she has them wetting the clay it obviously isn't plastilina.  Terra cotta would need to be fired. Here the need for it to be hollow becomes obvious.  Solid clay would explode in the firing, if you could even get an adequate temperature around such a thing.  And if not fired it would melt in the rain long before anyone got to shoot it to bits.  And it would slump in the firing and shrink 10% when drying.  If not fired, drying would cause it to crack to pieces if solid. But even if hollow it couldn't hold up under its own weight.  But these are minor complaints.

So this is why I have trouble reading some historical novels.  I want to make adjustments.  I want technical exactness in the art making.  I want someone to do for Leonardo what Irving Stone did for Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy.  Nearly a thousand pages, tiny type, and thoroughly researched, that novel filled my mind for 1 1/2 years as I read it one or two tiny chapters at a time every other night.  That was back in High School and the first year that I was a college student.  I felt like I was living in Renaissance Florence.  Why didn't Irving Stone do Leonardo?  Surely he is just as interesting as Michelangelo or van Gogh (Lust for Life).  If I find myself unemployed, without anything to do (ha) perhaps I will tackle it some day.

Other novels of Leonardo include Leonardo's Swans, which is more about the d'Este sisters than Leonardo, and The Memory Cathedral, a sci-fi story about the lost years (years in Leonardo's life that are missing in the documentary evidence of the time.)  It has some disgusting and some gruesome parts.  I won't spoil it with details, but I suspect there is some realism in those, alas.  The bad behaviour is not on Leonardo's part, unless you fault his lack of response.

I've also recently read Ken Follett's Fall of Giants.  This is not something I would have purchased but a friend sent it as a gift.  Before she sent it I'd debated in my mind whether to get it because I had greatly enjoyed his saga of the coming of the Gothic age to England in the series that began with Pillars of the Earth.  But this new one took place during WWI.  I was surprised that I found it absorbing.  You want the people to survive, to return to each other, to reconcile their differences.  It weaves personal stories and historical action more believably than the medieval novels, but both series have that strength.

More melancholic musings over the obsolescence of the artist

The computer drew this the other day

I drew this long ago, age 18.  

I’ve recently seen a video of a robot that draws the customer’s portrait on the foam of their latte.  The video is described as a machine that can “print art on top of a cup of coffee” with no scare quotes around ‘art’.   Does the public not make any distinction between this and a painting? Anyway, the computer looks at you, decides what’s important to draw to make your face, and “expresses” this onto the foam with food coloring.  I can at least appreciate the punning.

Another video demonstrates 3D printers that can print out a guitar.  Bye-bye, luthiers?  It also prints records.  When recorded music became an easily obtained commodity the playing of musical instruments became much less common.  Can we imagine a time when music is something you listen to but no one makes music anymore?  When it is composed and created by machines with programs to produce whatever style and set of sounds you wish. Photography had once seemed to pose such a threat to art, but there was a difference.  Behind the camera was an eye selecting and then hands developing, manipulating, and printing the image.  It was as we say just another tool with which to create.  But computer-made computer generated images remove the need for the human eye and hand. I am not talking here about digital imaging, with the computer as a tool.  I am referring to computer programs that generate the image entirely without human instruction or intervention.  You might think that the writing of the program was the creative part.  But that would be akin to saying the designer of the urinal, not Duchamp, was the creator of Fountain (1917), another once-seeming threat to the nature of art.  But Duchamp’s ready-mades merely altered the material act and left the artist’s invention/intervention intact.  Yes, the viewer completes ‘the creative act’, as Duchamp’s essay by that name contends, but the artist remained as the ‘medium’ or mediator between the physical object and the viewer’s experience.  In the case of the computer generated image or object, there is no actual artist, or perhaps there once was (the designer of the program) and now there is no need of another for further ‘art’ to be made.  The computer robot can just keep making variations.  In a world already saturated with images and objects, will there no longer be a need for human activity to create more? 

It would be interesting to find out if the widespread use of creative media that do much of the designing, thinking, and facture for you has led to a decrease in interest in art as we have known it.  That is, will playing with programs on your computer lead to fewer visits to museums, reduced interest in musical performances (not just production of music at home but attendance at concerts).  Most concerts and performances I attend have many empty seats now, and the audiences are mostly grey-haired.  Will fewer people feel a need to attend art school?  Or will some 20^th century ideas of life becoming art, removing the need for something set aside as special called Art, become reality? 

Since I wrote the above, the CAA newsletter linked me to an article in the Guardian that laments the demise of white-collar work and that of the creative classes.  It seems there are also computer programs that can analyze legal contracts and others that read medical data and diagnose better than human doctors.  It looks like humans may become obsolete.  Here is a quote that shows I am not the only one sensing a problem here:

“It may still be some time before robots are writing novels or painting pictures, but it is striking how many of the UK's most high-profile creative industries have already been automated. In music, for instance, it is disquieting how easy it now is to produce a record of commercial quality. To learn to play, let alone compose, a piece on the guitar or piano would take most people years of dedicated effort. But with readily available software on a standard laptop, and a few days of instruction, it is possible for bedroom record producers to generate and aggregate all the components of a perfectly reasonable pop song.”    (“The End of the Creative Classes is in Sight” by Tom Campbell)

There still are people who can, for example, hand-craft the equivalent of a Stradivarius violin, but what will become of such trades when there is no one who bothers to learn to play because a machine can synthesize the sound and even vary the interpretation so you can listen to an infinite number of ‘performances’ without anyone having to spend tens of thousands of hours practicing with care and dedication?  Apply this to everything we do and we are not really talking about ceasing to make buggy whips and building auto ignitions instead. Even decision-making has been automated, e.g. financial advice.  What will there be left for people to do? 

I do realize that the computer programs for creative design, or performance, or writing, or the grading of writing in lieu of teachers, do not yet imitate the quality of human work.  And this is not about using design programs with the computer as a tool for the designer.  This is about the computer doing the design without a human.  The threat is still in the future, but some effects are growing now. 

Am I foolish for worrying about this?   

Now I just found out that an MIT prof has done a TED talk on the same worries.

Are Artists Obsolete?

Several years ago a couple artist friends and I were at the mall.  There was a photo booth that did your portrait in the style of (select one: Rembrandt, Renoir, Ingres, ...).  "We might as well just quit now," one of them moaned as a digital hand moved a digital pencil and drew examples.  Walter Benjamin could not have foreseen this when he penned his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  That was worry over reproduction, after all, and this was . . .  creation?  Why not; computers now write poems and novels, play chess, suggest restaurants you might like, and even can draw pictures of your thoughts or identify words you are thinking.  So why don't we just quit now?  What is there for a person to do that isn't automat-able?

The memory of that moment came to me when my old computer started to fall apart, requiring a replacement.  The new one came with new toys preloaded, including one called "Photo Booth."  It works a bit like the one in the mall except the only specific artist in the selections is this one illustrated above, called 'Pop Art', but obviously it is like a Warhol.  May I have my 15 minutes of fame now?

There were other ways to shoot oneself with this app, or whatever you might manage to get in front of the computer.  At first I thought this was some scheme to appeal to narcissists (maybe I can get the cat to pose) because it seemed the only thing this was good for was self-portraits.  So I tried the drawing version:

This caught me in profile and set me to remembering a page in my earliest hardbound sketchbook from the early 70's (my teen years).  So I hunted it down and photo'd it (above).  It is from near the end of the book and so I am around 19 or 20.  I did not own a camera at the time, and xerox machines did not yet exist.  So to get this profile, two mirrors had to be set just right so that looking into one I could see my profile.  It appears that the claim that one's nose continues to grow must be true.  The mechanical drawing is decades later.  The old sketch was done very quickly and is marred by transfer from the opposing page and stuff bleeding up through like a palimpsest. But clearly the nose is shorter but much lumpier in the old sketch.  Was I imagining that or exaggerating what I saw as a fault?  The human-made sketch records perceptions that the photo can't, even given that there are decades between the renditions. The computer -made drawing has the illusion of being more accurate, but don't believe it.  Every attempt at a photo looks different, sometimes like a completely different person.  The insistently slanted lines get boring after a while. Humans when they draw well vary their line direction and quality, and can thereby get a more interesting and expressive result.  So far.  

This notebook page set me to thinking about other occasional self-portraits I've done over the years.  Nostalgia set in and I flipped through some old boxes of drawings.  I will post some and continue thinking in my next post about the question of whether artists can be replaced by automation the way many other occupations have been.