One of My Favorite Spots on van Gogh's Starry Night

One of My Favorite Spots on van Gogh's Starry Night

Here is one of my latest paintings in a somewhat low resolution image.  It is hanging in our Faculty exhibit that will be up in the Plunkett Gallery of Hardman Hall until sometime in mid-September.  I call it a P'Art Object, because it's a part of a work of art.  As the title lets you know, this is to be found on van Gogh's Starry Night.  It's a tiny spot blown up big (original about an inch across; painting five feet).  I won't say where it is in case you would like to try to spot it.  The photo works like a distant view; depending on your eyes several feet away or more you see what appears to be big gigantic gobs of impasto brushstrokes made by huge brushes with spots of bare canvas catching paint where the weave lifts the crossings of huge threads.  You walk up close and find it is pretty much flat and covered with thousands of brush strokes, layers of glaze peeking out from around and under them and enlivened with streaks of scumbling.  (Darned autocorrect doesn't believe scumbling is a real word.)  Of course the low resolution of the image causes the subtleties of surface texture, color, and details to disappear when you zoom in.  So here is a close-up.  We can call it "One of my favorite spots on one of my favorite spots on van Gogh's Starry Night".

So you can see how painterly the whole is.  It works in a similar way as the painting in an earlier post called Buddha of the Ten-Thousand Colors.  I like to play with people's perceptions.  And I like what paint can do. Just trompe l'oeil (fooling the eye) isn't enough.   It's more interesting when it is obviously paint and then turns into something else.  Or rather the other way around.  The viewers become very aware of the shift in their perceptions as they approach the painting.  When I did old-fashioned trompe l'oeil paintings they tended to get poked and kicked as people tested their suspicions that the object wasn't what they were seeing, and some got angry when they realized they'd been fooled.  When you get to looking at the real brush strokes in this you can see the real canvas weave made visible by the glazes pooling in the spaces between the threads.  The scumbling resembles the gaps in van Gogh's giant strokes.  What tickles my fancy about this painting most is that it is a painted representation of paint.

The Temptation of St. Anthony (still life painting)

This is another older painting (someday soon I'll have newer stuff), from the 1990's.  The francs were usable cash at the time.   It is in the tradition of old trompe l'oeil collections of scraps, like Peto's and Harnett's letter racks, or bulletin board paintings.  You put into them whatever you want, so they are sometimes called a quod libet. The theme of this one is of the foolishness of desires and takes its title (The Temptation of St. Anthony) from the paperback book in the lower left, Flaubert's Tentation de Saint'Antoine.  So in a way it is also a Vanitas.  But when I started it began with the wish that I could paint or have painted the Temptation of St. Anthony panel of the Issenheim Altarpiece.  There it was on the cover of the book, so I built a still life around it.  Some of the things on the table top are real things and some are painted illusions.  In person you can't tell which is real and which painted, but in a photo I think it starts to be more obvious.  The surface itself is an old drafting table top complete with cuts, scratches, and paint spots from decades of real use.  The table fell apart so I used the top as a painting panel.

Flaubert wrote the book because he was torn inside from two sets of values.  Part of him loved art and beautiful things and other such worldly pleasures.  Part of him had a rather Puritan urge to forgo all the foolishness of desires and live a life of what we would call voluntary simplicity.  These two characters fight also within me, and probably in a good number of us.  

The painting won best in show in a regional juried exhibit, and is now owned by the Macon Museum of Art and Science.  They had a conservator treat the match heads, lest a mouse scratch them and set the museum on fire.  They aren't a museum that exhibits their own collection permanently, but every once in a while it gets selected to join other works in a curated exhibit.  I can't resist saying that one time it was in with a show that included some quite famous names.  See what I mean about temptation?

No, you can't see any credit card numbers on it.

A Sierpinski Mandala

This was painted in 2006.  Like the Buddha of 10,000 colors that I posted a while ago, it consists of squares of color, this time in a variety of sizes.  The whole is 20" x 20".

A Sierpinski carpet is a two-dimensional surface that has no surface.  Theoretically, that is. You take a square and divide it into nine squares.  Then you remove the middle.  Take each of the eight squares left and divide them into nine.  Remove the middle.  Continue until infinity.

It was rather difficult to get to infinity.  Awfully small squares and infinite time.  

When I decided it was close enough, the similarity to cosmic diagrams of esoteric Buddhism struck me, and also the one and the eight repeating.  In Hindu-Buddhism the numbers one and eight are special.  The Buddha is one, and then there is the eight-fold path.  So I painted a faint image of a meditating Buddha in the center square.  In the real painting it is much harder to see.  The camera sees more than the eye in this case, and adjusting the color didn't help.  The eight-spoked wheels on the eight green squares are printed on and are also more hidden than in the photo.  

Every once in a while I get an irrational urge to paint something like this, even though this is not how I usually work.  Some day it may make sense.

Merejkowski's Leonardo and other distractions

It is much harder than I thought to keep up a blog.  Especially when you are in the habit of saying yes to too many things.  This is the most exhausted I have ever been at the end of a semester.  There were six talks at conferences, symposia, colloquia, other people's classes, all within three and a half weeks, and in the middle of it I took a test in Mandarin.  And all the talks (I also ran a session at a conference) were on completely different topics.  I made it hard on myself by deciding to do the Chinese class. In spite of all that I am going to try to keep up with the second semester.  In the photo above, alongside the title page of the novel is a sheet of my attempts to practice characters with a brush pen.  The larger characters are my Chinese name, 史北思 (Shi Bei Si).  The Bei Si sort of sounds like Beth in Chinese (about as close as you can get) and means northern thinker (or scholar) , which is funny because I am from the north and a professor.  Shi also has an appropriate meaning ('tho I forget it at the moment) and is a common last name in China.  It was selected for its meaning and because my family name begins with S.

But in spite of all the work I did manage to read the Merejkowski.  Now I can cross off the to-do list the idea of writing a novel on Leonardo's life to parallel the Agony and the Ecstasy for Michelangelo.  That was a bit of a stretch anyway.  This book, written in 1899 in Russian (the translation was from 1928), does that.  It seems to start in the middle of his life but manages to go back to his childhood through cleverly inserted sections of Leonardo's reminiscences.  This works well because the evidence for his early years is much fainter in detail and a bit unclear, like memories.  For much of the book, nearly the first 2/3s of it, we don't get much of a view of Leonardo and certainly are not privy to his thoughts.  As a character, he is seen in the background.  Other people are the narrators and we see him glimpsed through their eyes and thoughts.  One whole chapter was supposedly pages from Beltraffio's diary, which reports things he has been told by Leonardo.  They are straight out of Leonardo's notebooks!  Alongside such nearly non-fictional chapters are people experiencing drug induced hallucinogenic parties with pagan deities.  I kept thinking how clever it all was, keeping Leonardo himself at a distance so that his character and story are as mysterious as the historical Leonardo.  Then, slowly, we see him closer and closer, through the door of his studio, then in conversations with his employers and others, then we are with him in the studio, and finally we hear his thoughts.  I don't think I'm giving anything away by this description.  It's such an old book, and anyone who would read it certainly is already aware of Leonardo's life and work.  It ends of course with his death, not the mythologized dying in the king's arms but a scene that is much more plausible and in its own way poetic.

The translation is beautifully written except for one thing.  The upper-class and educated characters and the artists all speak in a quasi-Elizabethan dialect with lots of thou's and doth's and such.  It bothered me at first, but then the stiffness and oddness of it began to fade.  Then I noticed tradespeople and peasants spoke in a country English dialect.  So I fully expected when Salai showed up he would speak Cockney or something.  But no, he spoke the gentlemanly Elizabethan too, and was not referred to as Salai but by his first name.  He did not play a significant part except at one point he saves the day… no, I won't give that surprise away.

Most odd was the realization as I read it that nearly everything that scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries have found to say about Leonardo is in this novel, at least implied in it, including the attempt to characterize Mona Lisa as Leonardo in drag.  This is refuted in the novel nearly 80 years before that idea was proposed and a believable explanation for the similarity of Leonardo's self portrait (if that is indeed his self portrait) and Mona Lisa is offered.  I can't believe my luck to have this copy of the book fall into my hands by chance.  Ands thanks, Carey, for recommending it.

Edinburgh at 5 am.

High Street and the castle and Prince's Street Gardens from Waverly Bridge at 5:30 am

A rare quiet moment in the very center of Edinburgh in early August, taken on the way to the airport bus to head home.  If I had known how wonderful the city is before people are out, I would have extended the nine or ten hour hikes endured every day by an occasional pre-breakfast stroll in the mist.  In this photo the old buildings below High Street fade and the even older castle almost disappears in the fog, like the way things seem to rapidly withdraw into the past.  The silhouette of the iron fence and nearby tree create a frame on three sides and its U shape is then repeated in the mauve-colored paths turned 90 degrees in both the picture plane and the perpendicular plane of depth.  You can see the National Gallery in the center just below the castle.  This was taken at the last moments of a trip mostly focused on the museums, galleries, and visual-art Fringe events.  I thought visiting before the Festival days would avoid the crowds, but Edinburgh in August is as crowded as Florence in July!  Maybe more.  There were times when I couldn't move, the streets were so full of people.

One photo I would have like to get but couldn't because it went by too quickly was of a street sign seen on the bus ride into town.  Large rectangle, white letters on red, it said "Changing Priorities Ahead."  !  You know you're in another world seeing something like that.  I'm sure it means something about the arrangement of the roads, but it seems to be some kind of prophesy and sets me to thinking of all sorts of messages one could put on such signs.

There are a few things I didn't get to do.  I didn't get out to Little Sparta, the studio estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (he called it a poem).  That was actually the first thing that had motivated me to visit, and I wasn't there the right time, didn't plan carefully enough.  A few hours earlier arrival or two days longer stay, and I could have taken a minibus trip that was only offered on Fridays in August.  It's virtually impossible to get there any other way, since the nearest bus stop is over four miles away.  Traveling lesson learned: plan carefully before reserving hotel room or purchasing air tickets.  I walked down Candlemaker's Row from Greyfriars, but couldn't find the sculpture of the little dog.  And I couldn't see much of the National Museum of Scotland because the Mary Queen of Scot's special exhibit ate up most of the afternoon. Half the National Gallery was closed for renovations.  But I'm not disappointed; I've excuses to return some day.

Getting there and getting around is very easy.  The Scots are very friendly and eager to be helpful.  The airport is tiny and easy to find your way through, and the bus takes you right to the center of town in just half an hour.  They run every 10 minutes in the first week of August.  You don't need exact change.  You can walk to anywhere in Old Town, New Town, or several neighborhoods surrounding them in a reasonable amount of time. I felt safe everywhere.  For weeks before going I was anxious and wondering if I was foolish to travel alone. It's been many years since I've traveled till I began again last summer.  I got a pin number for my Visa card and thought I was ready to get a good exchange rate, but then it turned out there had to be something in the card and the atm's wouldn't work. So I had to go to an exchange.  Surprise, the fees were much lower than getting Euro's with traveller's checks last year.  So I did ok anyway.  Rick Steve's advice was right.  Just go and trust that things will work out.  I will add more to this from my travel journal in days to come, including an experience of a possible haunting, thoughts on the art seen, sketches and photos. . . .

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.